


We Are KAAFF

by DonTheRock



Series: KAAFF [1]
Category: Andi Mack (TV)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Love/Hate, No Smut, Supernatural - Freeform, Teen Romance, Violence, super powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-01-20 22:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 39,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21289031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DonTheRock/pseuds/DonTheRock
Summary: A peculiarly quiet school lockdown results in the students of Grant High being required to transfer to a private school. After missing the bus that was supposed to take them there, Andi and Amber, two girls who aren't exactly fond of each other, meet two boys who are purposefully trying to avoid going to the private school. The question is why?Based on Disney's Andi Mack. Written fully in Andi's POV.For ages 13 and older.Trigger warning for sensitive subjects: gun violence; school shootings (non-graphic); violence/injuries.
Relationships: Amber/Andi Mack, Ambi – Relationship, Buffy Driscoll/Marty, Cyrus Goodman/T. J. Kippen, Jonah Beck/Walker Brodsky
Series: KAAFF [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1635178
Comments: 66
Kudos: 75





	1. Prologue

"You look fine," Buffy tells me. "Stop worrying."

She touches my wrist to lower my hand down from my face. I look at my phone screen to try to see if the smudged mascara is gone, but I can't see it clearly through the camera. Frustrated, I close my locker with a grunt. 

"Is it gone?" I ask. 

"It's hardly noticeable," Buffy replies, meaning no, it's not. 

"I'm gonna go find a mirror," I sigh. "I'll meet you in Math."

She nods and lets me go off toward the washroom. As soon as I enter in, the bell rings, and the noise from the hallway starts to die down due to the teenagers heading to class. I just need to make sure my face looks okay, and then I plan to go and only be a little late. I step up to the mirror and lean over the counter. I was right. There are still flakes of mascara under my eye. With my thumb and a little bit of water, I wipe the black away. 

I'm about to exit to go to class when something else sounds on the intercom. The words buzz through the speaker three times before going dead silent, and fear strikes my pulse. _Lockdown, lockdown, lockdown. _

Is this a practice? But they always tell us when we're going to have a practice. Does that mean this is real? 

I scour my brain for the steps I'm supposed to take. Usually, I'd listen to the teacher and let them direct me on what to do, but I'm alone in a washroom, so the procedure is a bit different. I hurry into the farthest stall, lock the door, and climb up onto the toilet seat. It seems useless; if someone wanted to get in here, they could simply do so by crawling under the stall door. But I put my feet up anyway, if just to give myself some peace of mind, however pointless that is in the grand scheme of things. 

I try to control my breathing, but it's hard. It's strange how the moment I start thinking about how I need to stay quiet, my lungs seem to thrust out air like a leaf blower. 

Then I wait. After ten minutes, the muscles in my legs start to ache, but I force myself to stay squatting. After twenty minutes, my balance becomes shaky, and my mind starts reeling with the possibilities of what could be going on. I haven't heard any gunshots, nor any sounds at all. Usually these are done within half an hour when they're just practices. A half an hour hits, and I know this is real. 

Grant High has never had a real lockdown before, at least not from what I've heard. How prepared could anyone here be? Although I know I should be more scared, the reality of the matter hasn't hit me yet. Maybe it's because things like this don't happen to me. They're just stories I hear on the news, names I see in eulogies, not real possibilities that could ever stumble into my own world. 

All it takes to spark that sense of terror that had been withheld is an echo of footsteps coming from the hallway. Each step somehow lines up with my heartbeat, which thumps violently as though trying to break out and run away from the situation. Pinpricks swallow my feet. They are hurting immensely now, but I don't dare to shift my position. 

I stop breathing completely when I hear the door to the washroom squeak open. A warm tear rolls down my cheek, splatting onto the knee of my jeans. The footsteps make their way closer to me, and I attempt to judge the distance of the source based on the sound. I also wonder how long can I hold my breath before getting lightheaded. 

I want so badly to close my eyes and pretend this isn't happening, pretend I'm still in bed and am yet to wake up from a nightmare, but my eyelids seem frozen open. And then I see it: a sharp pupil peering through the crack in the stall, a black hole surrounded by a green the colour of mucus. I know I need air now, for I'm starting to feel dizzy, but the simple desire to breathe isn't enough. My brain won't let me do it. 

I'm completely paralyzed by the time I see a masked face emerge from underneath the stall door, sliding in smoothly like the movement is automatic. I can't do anything but stare as a gun appears next to the face. _This is it,_ I think. _This will be the moment I die. _

But nothing comes out. Not a sound. Not a bullet. Nothing. The weapon retreats from my view slowly, and the person, along with the patter of their footsteps, vanishes out of the washroom. At the sudden absence of any stimulation, I begin to question if the person was just a hallucination. 

And then my vision starts to blur, and I feel my legs give out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the first little slice of my upcoming story. I'm going to continue with The Kippens first, and I'll hopefully finish that quicker than I did Last Names. I'm really excited to write this story, though, because it's going to be way different than anything I've ever written. I think y'all will like it, but I do advise that you be 13 or older if reading this, just because there will be violence, however I'll try to keep the graphicness minimal. If you're under 13 and violence doesn't bother you, then feel free to read this. I'm not your mom, so I don't care. I love you all, and I can't wait to show you all what I've been working on!


	2. Chapter 2

When Lahara Lakis, the reporter for Shadyside Central News, wears her black blazer, that's when you know it's serious. Red means event like a parade or festival, wellow means busywork reporting like letting some farmer talk about carrots for an hour, or interviewing an author about their new book on motivation, but black is special. The last time she wore her black blazer, she was at the site of a hurricane. I don't think anyone else has noticed—if they have, they haven't mentioned it to me—but it's been something I've been very aware of since she became a reporter back when I was ten. Talking with one of our school's English teachers doesn't seem comparable to a hurricane at first glance, but the longer one listens to the conversation, the more questions they have, and none of them are being answered. 

"It was a peculiarly calm event," Ms. Brixton explains into the microphone, her twangy voice breaking through her poise speech. "There were intruders there; we are certain of that. And they had guns, but they didn't use them, and they were wearing these black gas masks. At least that's what they looked like to me. About a minute after one broke into our room—well, not quite broke in; they unlocked the doors somehow—we all fell asleep, unconscious. When we woke up later, nobody was hurt. Look almost like nothing had happened, except that we were all still crowded in the corner of the classroom." 

Lahara Lakis, being an excellent reporter, shows nothing more than calm interest while the teacher is busy nearly hyperventilating telling the story. When Ms. Brixton is done, Lahara Lakis ushers her off screen like a mom trying to get her child to go to bed. She's polite but you can tell she wants the attention-seeking English teacher to leave so that she can offer the screen time to the next reporter, a man standing at another set of doors to the school beside a police officer. 

The specific words used by the officer are lost on me, but what I understand from the jargon is that there were remnants of some kind of gas found in the building, which would've been the cause of everyone passing out. As far as he knows, the gas doesn't have any lasting harmful effects on our health. 

"Thank you for taking the time to talk with me," Lahara Lakis says after the officer finishes. She shakes the man's hand then turns to the camera. "The police are continuing their investigation. They are still unsure of who the intruders were, but they will not stop until they find them."

The TV flips to black at the click of a button. Buffy tosses the remote for her television onto the coffee table and turns to face the rest of us. She sits on the floor next to Marty, TJ and Cyrus share the couch, Jonah is sprawled out on the sofa chair across the room from them, and I'm on the floor leaning against the side of that chair, watching Buffy's look of bewilderment.

"Does anyone else think this is super weird?" she says. "Why would people break into our school, point guns at us, then not use them? Why would they put us unconscious, then we wake up without a scratch?"

"That is bizarre," I agree. "But I don't know what else there is to it."

"There must be more," Cyrus joins in. "It's too pointless to not be something more."

All the while Cyrus is talking, TJ is staring at him, his smile widens, and when his boyfriend is done speaking, TJ replies, "You're cute when you act all Sherlock Holmes."

Cyrus can't help but smile back at his boyfriend, caving when TJ leans in to kiss him. 

"Oh my god," Buffy groans as she turns away, disregarding the two boys in favour of the rest of her guests. 

"How are you doing?" Buffy asks me. "You were alone in the washroom, right?"

"Yeah," I respond. The memory flashes in my head, but I don't want to see it again. I've already been seeing those eyes and that black mask, which I suppose was a gas mask, every time I try to sleep. I never had the time to process the image when I was actually seeing it, but I've had more than enough time to mull over it whenever I close my eyes. "I couldn't sleep last night," I confess. "Nightmares kept me up." 

"That must've been terrifying," Cyrus replies, coming back from him and TJ's other universe. 

"It was scary," I say, "and uncomfortable. I'm officially never using the washroom at school ever again. My legs were killing me from squatting on the toilet seat the whole time."

"TJ and I were in the library," Cyrus recalls. "I can still hear the door squeaking open."

"I hope the cops figure out who it was," Marty says. 

"Same," Jonah agrees. As he speaks, he scratches the back of his head. I don't actually notice it until he says, "Has anyone else's head been itchy lately?"

"Actually yes," Buffy replies. "Did the not-shooters give us all head lice?" she jokes.

"I'm fine," I counter. 

It seems that I'm the only one without this problem, because the rest of my friends all agree with Jonah. I assume it must just be a coincidence, probably placebo effect, because I'm unbothered completely, and I was at the school too, so it couldn't have anything to do with that.

"It's probably a side-effect of whatever gas they used to knock us out," Marty guesses. That could be a possibility too. Maybe I'm just weird and don't feel it or I didn't inhale as much as the others. 

Our attention is grabbed by Buffy's mom entering in the house, carrying four giant grocery bags in two hands. She kicks the door closed and sets the bags down with a thunk. As soon as he sees her, Marty jumps onto his feet and goes over in a flash. 

"Do you want some help?" he offers. 

"Thank you, Marty," Buffy's mom, Pat, responds. "There are still some bags left in the trunk if you want to get those."

"I'm on it."

Marty heads out the door like he's on a mission, and Pat follows him out, shutting the door to close off the crisp spring wind. 

"So your mom seems to like Marty," TJ notices. 

"Yeah," Buffy says. "He's been really sucking up to her lately."

"Why?" I ask.

"He says he's being proactive," Buffy responds. "My mom has an air hockey table in the basement that she wants to give away."

That earns a laugh from all of us. Marty's always been a charmer. Ever since he first met Buffy, she always told me about all the sickeningly smooth moves he made. Everyone likes him. My parents love him. The first time he came to my house for New Year's last year, he brought cinnamon rolls and instantly won a "you're-welcome-anytime" pass from my dad.

"Hey, guys," Jonah suddenly speaks up. "Did you hear about Adam?"

We all display blank faces, signalling that we haven't.

"Gus just texted me, saying he's in the hospital," Jonah finishes. 

"What?" Cyrus says.

Adam: the kid who always brought his pet lizard to science class. Cyrus, Jonah and I were in that class with him, so we got to hear the first month of the teacher telling him to leave his lizard at home, but by the end of January, he realized that Adam wasn't going to do that. From then on, he's had Jerry, his lizard, pattering around on his desk all semester, and I personally have loved being able to hold the little creature during lectures. 

"Gus doesn't know why," Jonah explains. "The doctors haven't said what's wrong with him, but he's been there since last night."

The door opening interrupts our discussion as Pat thanks Marty for his help. Marty finishes bringing the groceries into the kitchen before completing his show with a bow of his head, saying, "Anytime," and returning to his friends in the living room. 

Pat comes over too and speaks to her daughter now. "Since you have the rest of the week off school, how about you clean your room during this time?"

Because of the lockdown, our principal decided that we should have some time to rest and recollect ourselves before going back to Grant. We're also all required to attend at least one session with the counsellors that the school is providing for all of the students to go see. I had mine this morning, although it wasn't very useful. How can I possibly describe what I saw when my mind was frozen? I know the scene from every speck of dirt on the floor to every breath of the air venting through the echoing washroom, but none of that is able to find its way out through my mouth. It stays stuck in my brain, and I can't get it out in words. In conclusion, the session was mostly just me talking about how much I wanted Subway at that moment and how I wished I had had Subway during the lockdown, not topics that my counsellor was particularly interested in. 

"Got it," Buffy replies to her mother. "I'll do it tonight."

Pat tilts her head and crosses her arms, saying, "Your friends have been here all day, and it's almost six o'clock. You could clean it now."

Buffy looks like she's ready to argue, but Marty gets in the middle by saying, "You know what? I'll help you clean it."

Buffy lets out a huff. "Alright."

"I have to go anyway," TJ says. "I have a counselling session soon." He turns his head to his boyfriend beside him. "Want a ride?"

"Yes, please," Cyrus answer with a smile. 

The two boys get up and head towards the door to grab their hoodies, both of which are actually each other's that they swapped at some point in their relationship. They both say goodbye to all of us before exiting. 

"I guess I'll head out too," I announce as I get up from the floor. 

"Me too," Jonah says. "Wanna go to The Spoon?" he asks me. 

"Sure."

"I'll walk you guys out," Buffy says.

She watches as we get our shoes and jackets on then step out onto the porch.

"See you two tomorrow?" Buffy checks.

"You know it," Jonah answers for both of us.

It doesn't take long to walk to The Spoon, and when we entering in, I see numerous people I recognize from school. There's one booth left unoccupied, as though the servers knew to save it for us, so that's the one we take. 

I take off my coat and lay it on the inner side of the bench, sitting across from my friend. Immediately, he notices me zipping my eyes around the diner and calls me out on it. 

"Looking for her again?"

"No, I—" 

I stop my sentence when I see Amber step out from the back of the diner in her uniform. She spots me in an instant and stops in her tracks, quickly deviating toward the counter where she gets the attention of her coworker. I can't hear what she's saying, but she flickers her eyes to me as she talks. 

"I know she works here, but somehow I always get annoyed all over again when I see her," I mutter. 

"You two used to be such good friends," Jonah reminds me.

"Yeah, well, not anymore."

"What happened?"

The question makes me flinch. I don't want to explain everything that happened between Amber and I to Jonah. Although it was almost a year ago, it still makes me uncomfortable to think about. We were very close. We did almost everything together. We studied together, braided hair; I even went to her uncle's wedding, because her entire family knew me. Now she's deleted all the photos she used to have of us together from her social media. 

"I found out we didn't work as friends the way I thought we did," I respond. 

"That's vague," Jonah comments. 

Saving me from explaining any further, the server who Amber was talking to comes up to take our orders. Neither Jonah nor I need to take any time to ponder; we both recite what we want from our memories like the national anthem. I hoped Jonah would move on from the topic of Amber and I after ordering, but when the boy leaves, Jonah brings it up again. 

"You two didn't end well, huh?"

"That's an understatement," I say. 

My phone screen lighting up alerts me to check it, and I realize I've just received an email from the school. It seems normal until I read the message past the part where the sender wishes me a peaceful week, coming up on an unusual paragraph. I reread it a few times to make sure I'm not misunderstanding, but the meaning is the same every time: starting on Monday, all Grant High students will be required to transfer to a special boarding school. Apparently, it's for our safety and well-being, but this seems weird, since none of us had any idea that this was going to happen.

I look up to Jonah, who's also on his phone.

"You get the same email?" I ask. 

"Yup," he replies. 

We both turn our gazes to all the students around us in the diner, all of them on their phones. The room feels like the earth beneath it has sunk down and unsettled the entire structure in a matter of seconds.

"Since when do they make students switch schools after a lockdown?" I say.

"It wasn't even a real shooting," Jonah adds. 

"Maybe it's a new procedure?"

Jonah glances down at the message on his phone then back up to me. "That's one weird procedure."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! I'm not gonna say much, because you've still got more to read, as soon as I proof read it. Give me half an hour. I'm a slow reader.


	3. Chapter 3

"Gus says there's still no word on what's wrong with Adam," Jonah explains, paraphrasing the text he just got. "The doctors don't even know what's going on with him."

As tradition states, him and I walk to school together, along with Buffy and Cyrus as well. It would almost feel like just another normal day if we weren't all pulling suitcases behind us. They clank every time the wheels cross a line between the sidewalk squares, beating our footsteps in the contest of who can be louder. 

"Okay, so nobody knows what's wrong," Buffy reiterates, "but, like, what were the symptoms? Why was he brought to the hospital in the first place?"

"Gus doesn't know much," Jonah responds. "His parents were the ones who brought him there. According to them, he was burning up, feeling really hot, and they were worried. He's being transferred to a different hospital for further inspection."

I wonder if whatever sickness he has is contagious, and if it can spread to lizards. Because if so, his lizard certainly must have it too. 

An endless line of Coach busses hug the curb by Grant High School, and a sea of teenagers tramples the grass, weighs down the benches to full capacity, and leaves no dead space in the airwaves, for they're all conversing nervously about how they think this new turn of events is going to go. I overhear the people around me, putting together enough chatter to get a clear idea of the various perspectives. Some think it's just temporary, and that we'll be back to Grant in a few weeks. Others think we'll be there for the rest of our high school years. The smallest group, also the most radical ones, are suggesting that this is a government plot to restrain Gen Z because of fear that they will form an unbreakable alliance through the means of Tik Toks and dance moves with hidden messages. 

Nobody knows where the school is. All we know is that it's somewhere outside of Shadyside. It seems bizarre, but the email my parents received about me switching schools was signed by the actual president of the country, President Singh. In it, he explained that he's sorry to hear about this traumatic event that us school children went through, and that us moving schools is a necessity in order to ensure our security while the authorities sort through the issue of the not-shooting. Personally, I don't know how to feel about all of this. 

Cyrus's worry disappears from his face as he spots his boyfriend in the crowd and goes over. At the sight of Cyrus, TJ flashes a smile and reaches out his hand to interlock with Cyrus's. Jonah and Marty head over as well, leaving Buffy and I alone. I consider joining the boys, but the unsettled gaze of Buffy's eyes on the busses tells me that she needs to get something off her chest, so I stay beside her. 

"You okay?" I ask. 

She shakes free from her stare and replies, "Uh, yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. I just— Does this whole thing feel strange to you?"

"A bit," I admit. "But it's just a new school. Just like going from Jefferson to Grant. And we'll all be together still. None of that has changed."

"But it's not the same," Buffy says. "And none of us know why. In what way will this keep us more safe?"

"They haven't caught the intruders yet," I remind her. "Moving us somewhere else kind of makes sense."

"But would they really come back to the school where they already broke into?" Buffy questions. "I doubt it."

I fall silent, not sure what else to say. I don't have many arguments to help her feel better about this, because I don't feel good about it either. 

As I look over to the school, I remember some things I have in my locker that I'd like to take with me to the boarding school. 

"Hey, I'll be back in a minute," I tell Buffy. "I had some photos in my locker that I want to get."

"I'll come with you," she responds. 

We squeeze through the crowd and into the school where we're hit with an astounding breath of emptiness. The quiet is a shocking change from what is on the outside of the doors. I can even hear the wheels of our suitcases rolling along the floor as we make our way to my locker. I wonder if this will be the new normal once we're gone. Will anyone still work here? Will it be left to collect dust for the next . . . however long this lasts?

When I open it, I see the photos of my friends and I on the inside of the door. One of them is from my first day at Grant, which was a year after my friends', because I went to Shadyside Acadamy of the Visual Arts for my grade nine year. In the image, Cyrus, Buffy, Jonah and I all pose in front of Grant. In another picture, nine year-old me, Cyrus and Buffy smile in a group hug. One was taken of us at Adrenaline City in eighth grade, one from our bike trip, also known as the best day ever. One from our failed attempt at recreating our best day ever. I push the magnets off the photos as I collect them in a stack, but one drops and slips down behind the stack of unfinished teen fiction novels that I still have yet to return to the library which holds the land at the bottom of my locker. 

"Great," I mutter as I kneel down to search for the picture. I shove the books around to look for the lost memory. 

After a few seconds of feeling around, I touch not one but two pieces of paper. Confused, I pull them both out to see what each are. One is the photo I dropped. The other is also a photo, only I don't remember dropping it. It must have been here for months. The corners are crumpled, and my shadow blocks the light from hitting the glossy photo paper, preventing the blonde in Amber's hair from glowing any more than it already did the day we took this picture. In it, we're wearing the friendships bracelets we got as souvenirs from Henefer when she took me on a road trip the October before last. I remember that day—us sitting on a lawn outside an ice cream shop, her kissing my cheek, which seemed to warm me from the inside out, countering the cold of the air. 

For a moment, I consider taking this photo with me too, but my soft emotions are quickly met with the anger I still feel about everything that happened with us, and I drop the picture, leaving it to the ghosts of this empty school to enjoy when I'm gone. 

I close my locker and adjust the straps of the backpack I'm wearing, then turn to Buffy. "Got what I needed," I say. Then we both head back outside to rejoin our schoolmates.

We get outside just in time to hear the vice principal, Mrs. Roule, start talking through a bullhorn. "Okay, we're going to start loading the busses now. Please listen carefully to hear which bus you're on. Once called, please go toward your correct bus and give your luggage to the teacher loading the suitcases." 

She begins calling names, eventually getting through all my friends' names and reaching the 'M's. When I hear my name called, I walk up to the bus, but then I stop when I realize I'm missing something. Suitcase! I left my suitcase at my locker.

I figure I have enough time to go grab it, so I wind my way through the mess of students back back into the building where I find my suitcase sitting alone at at locker like a lost child at a supermarket. I clutch the handle and hurry to pull it through the school hallways, but as I turn a corner, I nearly crash into another person coming from the opposite direction. I identify the figure immediately, wiping away my natural instinct to apologize.

"Amber?"

The front pieces of her hair are pulled back in a waterfall braid, leaving the rest flowing down in perfectly done curls, and she wears a lavender-coloured blouse, one I don't recognize, tucked into blue skinny jeans. I used to know all the shirts she owned—I was with her when she bought half of them—but now everything she does is unknown to me, and I'm unable to unwind my feelings on the matter. It's too complex, too much, that it's easier just to settle with not caring. 

Strapped over her shoulder is a giant yellow duffle bag, which looks packed so full that it might burst at any moment, but somehow she still has enough stuff to fill a full suitcase as well.

"What are you doing?" I interrogate.

"None of your business," she hisses back.

I don't care enough to push it any further, so I just say, "Whatever. We need to get outside before the busses leave."

I stride around her before she has the chance to respond, and she trails along in my shadow. While we walk, I notice her footsteps start falling behind mine, and I look back to see her a good ten or so metres away from me. As she saunters along, she holds her duffle bag steady with one arm, treating it with the care and caution that you'd give a baby. 

"Will you hurry up?" I call. 

"I'm working on it," she replies.

She continues her snail-like pace, and I have to stop and pause every once in a while to wait for her to catch up, but we eventually make it to the doors. When we step outside, the crowd is gone and so are the busses. Steaming with annoyance, I whip around to face the burden that kept me from making it on time.

"What's wrong with you?" I shout. "Why couldn't you move faster? Now we've missed the busses, and we have no idea where the school is, so we can't go there ourselves!"

"Holy shit. Calm down, princess," she retorts. "I'll just text Iris and ask her to tell the driver to come back to get us."

I wait impatiently while she types the message on her phone. After a few seconds, she furrows her brows, seemingly perplexed by whatever is occurring on the screen, then she types again. Her look of confusion only heightens.

"Well?" I say.

"It won't send," she says. "The texts aren't going through."

I roll my eyes and take out my own phone to try, since hers clearly isn't reliable. I text the group chat with all of my friends and watch as the little bar at the top crawls across the top to show that it's sending. It gets about three quarters of the way until it stops and a red exclamation notice appears beneath my text: _Failed to send._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. We're getting there. This is going to pick up soon, and I'm super excited. You've got one more chapter coming soon! Also, I don't like Trump, so I changed the president to be the Canadian NDP candidate instead. Love y'all!


	4. Chapter 4

I try sending the message again. It doesn't go through. I try sending it individually to all my friends. Doesn't go through. Then I look at Amber, feeling like I'm going to boil over.

"What the hell are we supposed to do now?" I snap.

"Calm down," she says. She touches her hand to my shoulder the way she used to when I was worked up, but I'm not having it. She must realize that, because she pulls away almost immediately. "There must be someone still here. Let's go into the school and find someone who can contact someone on the busses."

Although reluctant, I follow her inside, having no other choice anyway. It's just as soundless as it was a few minutes ago. It feels empty right away, and as we peak into every room, it starts to prove itself empty as well. I'm about to tell Amber that this is useless when she skids to a stop in front of the library. Through the glass panel windows, a small yellow beam lights up the far corner of the room where the librarian's office is.

"See," she says. "I told you we'd be fine."

She looks at me, as if waiting for some kind of response, some acknowledgment that she was right. When she accepts that I'm not going to give her that, she sighs and reaches for the giant bar door handle and swings open the gateway to the library. Right when we step inside, we hear shuffling come from the office, and the face of the librarian—a little woman with curly red hair like a poodle, and tiny, oval-shaped glasses on a pearl chain—peeks out at us above one of the shorter bookshelves.

"Oh my," Miss Dancy, the librarian, chirps. "What are you two doing here? You're supposed to be on a bus?"

"Yeah, we missed them," Amber explains.

Her fluffy little eyebrows scrunch in frustration as she scurries over to us between the shelving.

"You need to get a hold of them and get them to come back for you," she tells us as though we don't already know that.

"That's why we're talking to you," Amber responds.

She shakes her head and spins around to shuffle back to her office only seconds after she reaching us. "Wait here," she orders. "I am going to try to sort this out."

While the librarian disappears back into the bright spot in the room, Amber sets down her duffle bag and folds her arms over her chest, turning to me.

"I told you I'd fix it," she gloats with one eyebrow raised in triumph.

"Whatever," I scoff.

She smiles in such a sickeningly pretty way that I need to look elsewhere, so I turn toward the doors to my left. That's when I notice two boys strolling down the hall past the library. Ignoring Amber's confused reaction, leave my suitcase behind and blast through the doorway, into the hallway where the two boys whip around to face me, standing like deer in headlights.

I recognize them. They're not in my grade, so I don't have any classes with them, but I always see them in the same spot at lunch: the first floor corner by the Mac lab. They dress in a similar aesthetic. Both are in baggy jeans, yet one pair is light and the is other back. Their tops also vary from each other. Light jean boy has a big, burgundy hoodie, while the other has an olive-coloured bomber jacket. The biggest difference between them, however, is the way they wear their hair. Light jeans has his coily hair buzzed close to his skull, leaving only a thin mat of black to cover it, while black jeans has looser curls than his friend (about half an inch in diameter) which sprout like leaves from the top of his head, and his sides are buzzed short.

"Aren't you supposed to be on a bus?" I question.

"Aren't you?" black jeans fires back.

"Miss Dancy's helping get a hold of the busses for us," I respond. "I can let her know that you guys need the bus too—"

"No thanks," light jeans cuts me off. "We're only here for the money—" A nudge from black jeans shuts him up, but Amber's already been enticed.

"Money?" she repeats and she steps away from the library doors and up closer to the boys. "What money?"

Black jeans rolls his eyes, muttering to his friend, "Smart move, dumbass."

"What are your names?" I ask.

"I'm Dean," black jeans answers, "and this is Tommy."

"Give me a break," Amber scoffs. "You're Eli and Leif. I know Pepper, and she's told me about you guys before."

"Wait," light jeans, as known as Leif, says. "Are you the girl she accidentally outed through a tarot card reading?"

"Yes," Amber replies quickly. She flicks her eyes to me, checking my reaction, but I don't have one. Although I didn't know about the tarot cards, she had of course already come out to me.

Desperate to change the subject, she questions, "What is this money you were talking about?"

Eli holds for a moment, considering whether to release this information, then eventually says, "I'll explain if you help us out?"

What help he is referring to is a mystery to both Amber and I, but she agrees without hesitation, too curious to let the opportunity pass. We follow them down the stairs to the first floor and into a room which I always thought was just a closet of some kind, but it turns out to be a huge storage room for all the props and costumes owned by the drama department. Eli and Leif don't strike me as drama club kind of people, so I'm initially surprised. However, this surprise dissolves when they make their way to the back of the costume racks and stop at the wall, turning their eyes up to the pipes and beams that run suspended from the ceiling like pieces of a maze. After a few more seconds, I realize that they are actually looking specifically at a painted black grate in the largest square beam, which must be the air duct. 

"Help us move the shelf over here," Eli says. 

Amber and I follow the directions, working with the boys to shove a giant shelf of various types of hats to underneath the vent. 

As Eli hooks his foot on one level of the shelf, Leif clasps his the sides of the structure firmly and nods at us to do the same. "Help hold it still."

Amber and I grab on to the wobbling piece of furniture, stopping the shaking with our support. I watch as Eli climbs up and kicks a leg over the top to sit. He reaches up with a screwdriver I didn't know he had and spins the bolts off the frame of the vent. Carefully, he wiggles the grate free and plucks a wad of green from the space before screwing the vent back on and coming down to the floor. The rest of us let go of the shelf as he flips open the stack of cash. It seems like too much money to be real. 

"How much is that?" I question.

"Four Hundred," Eli responds. 

Amber gasps. "What do you need four hundred dollars for?"

"It's our apocalypse fund," Leif answers, swiping half of the bundle from his friend. "We been collecting it since we were freshmen. Asking people for a dollar for bus money everyday." 

"And you're taking it out now?" Amber says. "_This_ is your version of an apocalypse?"

"Newsflash, princess," Leif says, and Amber winces at the nickname, even though she called me the same thing earlier, "this is pretty close to being one."

"What are you talking about?" 

"We're being shipped off to some place we don't know after something happened where, in essence, nothing actually happened," Eli reminds us." We're all fine, but we're still being moved? That's not what happens to people who are fine. There's something more to all of this, and you both are too blind to see it."

I shake my head. "You're wrong."

"You're naive," Eli snipes back. "And you think that lizard kid went to the hospital because he was sick? Listen, I saw him after the lockdown, and he looked healthy as ever. All seems a little too convenient to me."

"This isn't some plot against us," Amber reasons. "We're just kids. We can't do anything. This isn't some teen dystopian novel."

Her voice cracks, revealing her doubts about everything she's saying. And I can't blame her. Nothing seemed clear from the moment I got the first email. But could they actually be right? Our friends are going to that school, even if it isn't just a school to keep us safe, so it hardly seems fair to let them stay there while we disappear to help ourselves.

"Yeah, well, you guys can believe that," Leif tells us. "We're getting out of here."

"Where are you going?" I question.

"Somewhere they can't find us," Leif replies. 

Him and Eli stuff the money into their backpacks before swinging them back over their shoulders securely. It looks as though they're about ready to go, but I'm still trying to understand what is happening and everything they said. 

Then Eli shuffles his eyes between Amber and I as he says, "You can come too if you want, but you gotta decide quick."

Neither of us have the chance to respond, for the voice of the librarian in the doorway grabs our attention. "There's more of you?"

I can see the ice in Eli and Leif's eyes as they look at the woman. They were just trying to get out unseen, and, although not directly, it's partly my fault that their plans are ruined. Maybe it's best that they were caught, because now they can go see that there's nothing weird going on at the school, and everything's perfectly okay. Or they'll be proven right. I really don't know which to believe. 

"Come along now," Miss Dancy calls to all of us. "We've got to get going."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I watched Newsies. It's a really good movie. Also, I'm super into protest history now, so that's fun. Leave recommendations of other movies based on or inspired by true protests and strikes. Thanks! Bye!


	5. Chapter 5

The librarian's Porsche SUV is definitely not a bus, but after contacting whoever is in charge, she told us that there aren't any busses that can come back for us now, so she is going to be the one driving us. It smells like honey inside, and there is what looks to be cat hair ingrained in the seats. I take shotgun, leaving Amber to be squished between Eli and Leif in the back. Taking up even more space is Amber's duffle bag, which she refused to put in the truck, so she's carrying it on her lap. When Miss Dancy scoots in, she turns the radio to the Christian rock station, and the music quietly dusts the car interior as she pulls out of the school parking lot and onto the road. 

In the right side mirror, I can see Eli glaring at me from the back. He didn't want to be here. He wanted to be gone, but I hope I'm doing him a favour by accidentally getting him hooked along with me and Amber. 

While we drive, Miss Dancy tries to start light conversation by saying, "So what grade are you kids in?"

When no one else answers, I realize I have to be the polite one here and say, "Grade ten."

"Oh, that's nice."

"Yeah."

Silence. I don't know what more to say. She doesn't know what more to ask. Nobody in the back is willing to speak up until a few more kilometres go by when Leif's curiosity starts bubbling out of his ears. 

"Where are we going?"

"To the school," Miss Dancy answers. 

"No, I mean where," Leif clarifies. "Like, where is the school?"

"A bit south. A bit west."

She's not telling us where it is, but I can see the address on the GPS. Well, it's not an address really. It's just coordinates: 38°16'22.7"N 113°13'03.4"W. I'll probably forget them as soon as we get there. Miss Dancy keeps flicking her eyes between the road and the GPS while she drives, even though we're on a highway, and we don't need to turn off for a long while. Although she refuses to tell us where we're going, she seems to have forgotten that the GPS can tell me just as well as she can. 

"What's happening to us once we get there?" Lief continues. 

"Well, I think you'll probably be assigned rooms, and—"

"What's really happening to us?" Leif shouts. 

"Holy shit, man!" Amber groans. "Just stop trying. She's not telling you anything."

"Excuse me, young lady," the librarian huffs, "but you'll use polite language in this car."

"Oh, whatever," Amber sasses back.

Miss Dancy starts to turn around with a glare, but the car nearly veers into the median of the highway, and she whips back to face the road, leaving me shaken up, and the three in the back giggling. 

I don't know when Amber became like this. She never swore when we were friends. But when we broke apart, she did her own thing, and I stopped paying attention. I wanted to forget she ever existed. I guess she changed while I wasn't watching, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

A few more kilometres of pointless questions ensues until it's finally brought to a halt when Eli says he needs to use the washroom. Originally, Miss Dancy denies the request, saying he can hold it, but after a bit more arguing and threats to pee on her carseats, she gives in and takes the next offramp into a town called Vineyard. The car slows into a parking lot outside a diner, gas station and convenience store all under the name "Mildred's." 

Right away, both Eli and Leif unbuckle their seat belts.

"I'm gonna go with him," Leif says. 

"Be quick," Miss Dancy tells the boys.

They rush out of the car as though energized by a sudden spark. As the doors slam shut, I catch eyes with Amber, and I can tell we're both thinking the same thing: they're going to run. 

"Actually, I'm going to use the washroom too," Amber speaks up.

"Me too," I say. 

We're both out of the vehicle before Miss Dancy can question it, and we follow the same path as the boys to follow them through the glass double doors into the store. 

The layout confuses me immediately. To my left is a diner with orange wood tables and wooden benches and chairs, and to my right is basically the same layout as a 7-eleven, with isles and a cashier counter hidden in the corner by the kitchen. The place isn't very busy; the few people who are here are quiet, sitting alone or in pairs. Amber spots Leif and Eli at the back by the freezer wall. 

During my walk over, I fall behind Amber as I stop, noticing the woman at the front counter. She takes the coffee she ordered and turns around. Our eyes lock for a moment, and spiky chills prickle down my neck and spine, giving me a feeling like I have to run. It's her eyes. The green bubbles like a witch's brew, and they yank the air out from behind my ribs with all the gentleness of a bulldozer. 

My feet start again in a pulse, sending me hurrying toward Amber, Eli, and Leif. When I reach them, they're already mid-discussion, and I'm ready to help Amber with convincing them not to leave.

"Wait," Amber says after the boys finish talking, "so where are we going?"

"Hold up," I interrupt. "What do you mean?" I though Amber was on my side. Why does she sound like she's playing along with Eli and Leif's idea?

"Andi," Amber says, "they're right. The librarian wouldn't even tell us where we're going. It doesn't make sense."

"But all of our friends are at the school," I reason. "Even if there is something bad about it, we can't just leave them all to figure things out for themselves."

"You don't have to come with us," Eli tells me.

"I'm not," I reply in a snap.

I spin around to go back out to the car. If there truly is something strange going on, then I need to be at the school to warn my friends. They can run away if they want, but they aren't going to fix the problem if they do that if there even is a problem. 

When I get outside again, the car appears normal, but Miss Dancy's stare is fixed on something ahead of her. I follow her eyes to a dead end of trees, then walk up ready to ask what she's looking at. But as I approach closer, her neck comes in to view, and the sight kick-starts a rush of adrenaline in me. Blood drains from a fresh gash in her neck, discolouring her yellow cardigan. I race to whip open the door and press my hands to the wound. I can feel her pulse under the pressure. It's slow, but it's going. Still, red seeps out from under my palms, spilling almost as fast as the tears from my eyes. 

"Miss Dancy!" I cry. "Miss Dancy!"

Her eyes switch no more than a millimetre in my direction, but it's enough to signal that she hears me. 

With some hope left, I shift my hands to keep my left firmly on her neck so that my right can reach for my phone in my pocket, leaving dark red fingerprints on my jeans. With wet hands, I struggle to dial 9-1-1. 

"It will be okay," I say to the librarian as I raise the phone to my hear.

Then her hand shocks me as she lifts her fingers and touches my elbow, making me lower my phone. 

"No," she whispers roughly. 

"What are you talking about?" I question.

"The ones who hurt me," her brittle voice cracks out, "they're the same ones."

"The same ones what?"

"Who hurt you."

Her words unleash a flood of flashbacks in my mind. The bathroom stall. The voice over the intercom. The black mask and green eyes. The not-shooters were the ones who sliced this poor librarian's neck. 

"We're the good ones," she continues, her voice getting weaker by the second. "The school. You'll be safe there."

I stare at her, my throat burning with the fear of the moment. It's so strong that I can't make any words, so I just nod. 

"Don't," she adds, barely audible now, "don't tell people who you are."

"Why not?" I ask, but I get no response. As her jaw settles open, I realize she's gone. 

Now the voice I'd neglected rings loudly through my phone speaker. "Hello? This is 9-1-1."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! It's getting spooky. I hope y'all are enjoying it. I'm super excited. Sorry I took so long. I cut my hair yesterday really short, and although I really think it looks good and I do like it a lot, I kind of regret it because it doesn't feel like my normal hippie style, but it will grow eventually and be longer-ish again. I still like it though. And I'm happy I tried something new, people why not, right? Anyway, I'll see you all again soon with the next chapter. Get ready for some excitement.


	6. Chapter 6

The red and blue flashing lights gleam in the glass windows of the diner. A swarm of police investigates every inch of the place and the space outside, specifically focused on the woman who's been stabbed to death in her car. Eli, Leif, Amber and I are at the back of the shop where I'm trying to explain Miss Dancy's last words before the police get to interviewing us. 

"Why can't we say who we are?" Amber whispers. "And if she's for us, then who's against us?"

"I'm guessing," I respond, "whoever killed her."

"So the school really is just trying to keep us safe?" Eli says. "That's boring."

"Wow, not everyone is against you," Amber says sarcastically. "Very boring."

"What if she was lying?" Leif suggests. "Just because you're dying, that doesn't mean you give up on your mission."

"You seriously think she wants to screw us over?" Amber retorts.

"I don't know," Leif says. "How many overdue books does a person got to have to want to kill a librarian?"

"Excuse me?" comes a deep voice, and we all turn to the police officer approaching us. "I'm ready to take your statements."

Eli goes first. The rest of us watch from a booth across the diner, silently guessing at what he's telling the police officer. We never had time to get a full story together, so we're all hoping our stories line up well enough that they make sense. 

"Something about a road trip," Leif whispers as he reads his friend's lips. "Don't know her. On our own."

After Eli is released, he comes back to join Amber and I, and Leif is taken second. He sticks to the story we collaboratively agreed Eli must've told, and it seems like the officer is buying it. 

"I'm nervous," I confess. 

"About what?" Amber asks. 

"We're in a room filled with police, being interrogated about a murder. What do you think I'm nervous about?"

"Fair point."

Leif finishes, and the officer comes to take the next person.

"Miss, would you come next?" He's looking at me. 

My stomach sinks. What if I mess up? It's a crime to lie to a police officer. What will happen to me if he finds out I'm lying? I find my eyes drifting to Amber involuntarily. Although I don't mean to sway her to help me, when I stand up to go over, she does the same. 

"You'll get your turn, miss," the officer says to her. 

"No, well, you see," Amber starts, coming up with a lie on the spot, "she's my sister." The officer raises an eyebrow, and Amber quickly adds, "My half-sister. And she's really shy around new people, so it'd be best if I come with her."

The officer is sympathetic enough to give in to the request, saying, "Alright."

He takes the lead in heading over, and I step closer to Amber to whisper, "I didn't ask you to help me."

"Yeah, well, I can do whatever I want," she buzzes back. 

That's so Amber. Ignoring what I want in favour of her own interests . . . which for some reason are to help me. 

"Okay," the officer says as we all sit down, "If the others were correct, your names are Kelsey and Sarah, yes?"

"Uh, yeah," I lie. 

"So the others are telling me you were the one who found the victim," he goes on.

"That's true," I confirm. 

"Can you elaborate?"

"Well, we had stopped here to use the washroom, and I went outside when I found the—uh—victim bleeding."

"I see," he says, scratching words onto his notepad. "So nobody else witnessed this?"

I share a quick glance with Amber before replying, "Yeah, I guess."

"Interesting," the officer says, "Now, you've all mentioned a road trip, but so far every car here has been claimed by others. Which one is yours?"

"Uh, we actually walked here," I say, panicking.

Amber flashes me a look and corrects my mistake, saying, "We parked at a place a bit back, because we ran out of gas."

"Okay," the officer responds. 

He asks a few more questions, and Amber and I, but mostly Amber, for she's lost her trust in me to answer wisely, replies with the details. Then he closes his notepad and stands up. 

"Thank you girls for your time. Now, could you give me the numbers and I'll call your parents."

"Our parents?" I react. "Why would you call them?"

"You're under 18. I need to."

"Oh, of course." 

I look to Amber, who takes the responsibility onto her shoulders, saying, "My mom's cell is 801-363-6300."

I'm shocked. She just gave herself up. The police can't call her parents. The first rule was to not tell people who we are, and if they call her parents, the police will know.

"Thank you," the officer says. "Don't go anywhere. They'll be here to get you soon."

Amber sees my expression and tells the officer, "We're just going to use the washroom."

He nods, giving permission, and Amber stands up, pulling me along by the wrist. On the way, she tells the guys, "Go to the washroom," then continues to the back to the girls' room. She shuts the door and checks the stalls to make sure it's empty before going to the back by the frosted window. While she's busy admiring the view, I'm infuriated.

"Are you crazy?" I say. "You told him your parents' phone number."

Amber rolls her eyes as she climbs up on the counter and starts picking at the window frame. "Relax. That's a number to a pizza hut."

"Okay, so he's going to dial the number and find out we were lying within the next five minutes," I complain.

A gust of wind interrupts my anger, and I look over to see the window swung open, with Amber holding it up. 

"After you," she says with a grin.

"Is this illegal?" I question. "They said we were supposed to stay here."

"It's only illegal if you get caught," she says.

As taken aback as I am, I do as she says. Something about her decisiveness always made me trust her choices, however questionable they were. After climbing outside through the hole and landing with two feet on the dirt, I turn around to see Leif and Eli already waiting for us. They all seem to be one step ahead of me and in sync, while I'm left wondering if they made plans while I wasn't paying attention, or if the level of teen angst they all acquire somehow connects them mentally. 

Amber hops down behind me and immediately asks, "So what's the plan?"

"We get out of here," Eli answers. 

"No," I counter. "We get to the school."

"Nah, we ain't going there," Leif says. 

"We have to. Miss Dancy said we have to," I remind them. 

"If Miss Dancy's working against us, then her words won't help us," Eli reasons.

"But even if the school is bad, all of our friends are there," I argue. "We can't leave them there to undergo . . . whatever you think is going to happen to them."

The boys fall silent, and all eyes turn to the only person who hasn't shared their opinion yet: Amber. Put on the spot, she tenses up, now forced to make a decision.

"Well, both of you have good arguments," she says. "But I uh . . ." She gives me a glance before looking back to the boys. "I agree with Andi. My brother is there, and I'm not going to let him be hurt."

"He's not going to get hurt anyway," I insist. "The school is not bad. It's there to keep us safe."

"But even if it isn't," Amber adds, "we're the only ones who can do anything about it."

Leif and Eli take a moment to come to an agreement through some sort of silent exchange of brainwaves before Eli nods his head, saying, "Aiight, fine. We go to school."

"Good," I say, feeling pleased with my negotiating skills. "How do we do that?"

We all scan our group, each of us being faced with the fact that none of us has any clue what the answer to my question is. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a lot shorter than the others, but we're gonna get into some exciting stuff next. I mean, hopefully y'all will think it's exciting. I think it will be. The fifth chapter is always when the story really starts, and here we are: the story is starting. Anyway, I love you all! Have a dandy night, and I promise to update more frequently once my exams are over on Thursday.


	7. Chapter 7

Step 1 of our completely unplanned plan: get our stuff. With our bags still in the car, we are devoid of the necessities like toothpaste and clean clothes for our trip, not to mention the $400 in apocalypse money that was made for this moment. 

Step 2: we haven't gotten that far yet. 

They haven't started searching for us yet, but they certainly will be soon. There's only so long a person is willing to wait before deciding it's worth the risk of being rude to find out why they've been in the bathroom for the past ten minutes. From behind the cover of the trees that kiss the edge of the parking lot, we watch one police officer finish inspecting the crime scene, which Miss Dancy's body has been taken from to the hospital. He goes inside, leaving the space guarded only by the two cops chatting in a police car, not even facing the scene. We figure this is our best chance to get our things with minimal eyes seeing us. 

We don't need all of us to go, so Eli and Leif appoint themselves for the quest. I'm still trying to get a clear grasp on what we're doing—running from police, lying to them about a murder—making it easy to convince me they should take the responsibility. 

Without even counting down, they step out in sync, sneaking up to the car. They make it up to the vehicle without turning any heads and successful open the trunk to toss me my backpack and grab their own, strapping them on securely. Next, they open the back door to get Amber's duffle bag.

"Don't throw it!" Amber tells them suddenly. 

Leif brings the bag back down from having nearly let it go flying, and he nods. Amber steps out from the safety of our tree cover to meet Leif and take the bag. Right as she grabs the handles, the door to the store swings open, and a cop sees them, eyes widening in surprise. 

"You kids!" he shouts. "What are you doing?"

As he starts toward them, Eli bolts, leaving our suitcases as collateral damage of the situation, and Amber speed walks after him. Leif's about to move too when the cop lifts the mouthpiece of his radio up to his mouth. He's about to speak, which would release a tidal wave on police on our tails, one we surely would not be able to outrun, when Leif notices it. 

"Don't!" 

The boy's voice somehow makes the cop drop the mouthpiece, and I think for a second that I see a spark flash from the device. Leif hesitates, processing the occurrence, before darting away to join the rest of us. 

We take off in a run through the woods. Amber, who seems to be incapable of moving quickly with that giant duffle bag, does her best to hold it still and run at the same time, but she's still moving a lot slower than the rest of us, so I do what is needed and grab her hand, pulling her along with me to make her hurry up. 

The town sprouts from the trees in a breath, with humble houses tucked tightly in a line, an unpainted street down the middle, and another row of houses parallel on the other side. Down the road, I can see the start of some shops, and a stout little red street sign points visitors toward downtown. 

"Stop!" I say. 

The others skid to a halt in an alleyway out of sight from the street and spin around to face me. 

"We need a plan," I say. "How are we getting to the school? I saw it on the GPS, but I can't remember the coordinates." 

"Wait," Eli speaks up. He pulls out his cell phone and types something then holds it up for me to see the map opened to the correct location. "Was this it?"

I'm so thankful. "You saw the GPS?"

"I guess I must have," Eli responds, looking a little confused himself. "I just kind of saw it in my head." 

"Okay, so your memory is amazing," I say.

"All my failed biology tests would say otherwise, but it seems like it," Eli replies. 

"Okay, so we know where we need to go, but how do we get there?" Amber questions. 

"Steal a car," Leif suggests.

"No way," I say. 

"Come on," Leif responds. "Desperate times call for desperate measures."

"I'm with Andi," Amber says. "We already have the police looking for us now. We don't need to create more trouble."

Leif crosses his arms and lets out a huff. "You got any better ideas, then?"

"How about we just take the bus?" Amber says. 

"We can't get that far on a bus," Leif tells her.

"So we take several busses. Look, you guys have money. It's better than getting us more noticed than is necessary."

"She has a point," Eli says. 

"Of course I do," Amber says. "Now let's get going before we're found."

______________________________________

The bus is going all the way to Spanish Fork. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing. Upon getting on the vehicle, we all toss our backpacks in the overhead compartments for bags, except for Amber, who holds her duffle bag like a baby as she takes her seat next to Leif and facing Eli and I. As the bus starts moving, she squeezes it tighter, and I finally lose my patience.

"What the fuck is so important that's in that bag?"

Amber initially looks like a deer in the headlights, but with a sigh, she caves and unzips the bag, letting it fall down to reveal a glass tank of 3 tiny snails on a bed of green. 

"What the fuck?" Leif reacts. 

"I'm not sure whether I have less questions now or more," I say. 

"Iris and I got them as pets for our lockers at the start of the year," Amber explains. "I wasn't going to leave them there to die while I was away."

"Good to hear you're responsible," I tease. 

"You're just jealous because my locker was cooler than yours," Amber replies with a chuckle. 

"I am not jealous," I tell her. "I'm just surprised that you know how to care for snails."

"Yeah, well, maybe when things get back to normal, I'll teach you how."

The way she smiles at me makes me need to divert my eyes downward to avoid the fluffy feeling that I know comes with that look. I end up giggling from the nerves that pour through me.

"What kind of weird-ass flirting is this?" Leif breaks in. 

And just like that, we both become awkward. I draw back, lifting my knees to hug them to my chest on the bench. Eli snickers next to me at my reaction.

"Hey, I'm just teasing you," Leif says. 

"Yeah." Amber clears her throat. Avoiding my eyes, she stands up, saying, "I'm gonna use the washroom. I'll be back."

I watch her as she walks away toward the back of the bus. I don't know how to describe what's going through my head right now. It's like I want her to leave and stay at the same time. But I threw away my chance of getting her to stay long ago. She thinks I don't want her around, and I can't blamer her for that. I've done nothing to show her otherwise. I didn't think I wanted otherwise. Funny how sometimes you do something, and you can't tell whether it's a mistake or a just a difficult right decision. They both feel the same way. 

"Do you guys hear that too?" Eli suddenly asks, bringing my attention back to the boys.

"How could I not," Leif mumbles. "That tension is loud."

"I'm not talking about that, bro. I'm talking about the noise."

"What noise?"

"It's like static and voices and all kinds of shit jumbled together. I don't know. I've been hearing so many things lately. And it's like my head is running a mile a minute with all the thoughts crammed up in there."

"Well, you are kind of going through a lot right now," I say. "It makes sense to have an unsettled mind."

"I guess so," Eli replies. 

I notice out the window that the sun is starting to approach the horizon. It will be likely be sunset by the time we get to Spanish Fork. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. I've never been anywhere in Utah, so I'm making up the descriptions. This was going to be longer, but there were some things that didn't feel natural trying to shove into this chapter, so they'll be in upcoming ones instead. Anyway, I love you, and have a good day and happy holidays!


	8. Chapter 8

Cotton candy clouds dab the tangerine-coloured sky as we enter town. After a short discussion of our options—stay at a cheap hotel, sleep in a park, or see how long we can keep going on Redbull and caffeine pills until we drop—and decide on the former of the three. It's only when we reach the cheapest hotel we could find on Trivago that we realize we can't use the apocalypse money to pay for it.

"It's fine," Amber says. "I have enough money. I'll use credit."

"You sure?" I check. 

"Well, are you gonna pay for it with all that money you make from the job you don't have?" she retorts. 

I hear Leif and Eli snicker behind me as Amber shoves open the door to the tall brick building at the edge of downtown called Weekend Inn, which, contrary to the name suggests, is open on more than just weekends. When we enter, the woman at the front desk looks up from her 1985 copy of Playboy magazine, flips her long bangs out of the way, notices four teenagers walking in, then looks back down. Amber put her elbows on the counter right in front of her, invading the lady's space, but she keeps her eyes glued to the pages. Amber clears her throat loudly, forcing the lady's grumpy eyes up. 

"I told Steve I was out," she mutters.

"Out of what?" Amber says. "Your sign says there are rooms vacant."

She looks surprised. "Oh—oh yeah. There are rooms. I thought you wanted— Never mind. How many rooms? What kind?"

"One room. Whatever costs the least."

The lady gives a smile that looks closer to a smirk as she slaps the room key down in front of Amber. It's a literal key, not a card, and it unlocks a room with walls stained with some brown fluid, a single king-sized bed, and no drapes over glass sliding doors that leads out to a balcony wide enough only for a one person. 

"Girls can take the bed," Leif says as he enters first.

"What, you think I'm fragile?" Amber shoots back. "I'm taking the floor."

I have plenty of names I could call Amber, but fragile is not one of those. As stubborn and self-centred as she can be, her fire is admirable. I hate myself to admit it, but sometimes I wish I could be like her. Or be with her. Be friends with her. Again.

"Uh, me too," I say. 

"Looks like it's you and me," Eli says.

"Hey, I'm not sharing a bed with a dude," Leif responds. 

"Relax," Eli says, tossing his backpack onto the bed. "If you wear your socks, it's not gay."

Amber and I laugh as Leif releases a chuckle and takes off his bag, placing it next to Eli's. 

"He's not actually homophobic," Eli assures us. "He just puts on these acts for laughs sometimes."

"I'd be really confused otherwise," Amber responds, laughing. 

"I'm hungry," Leif says as he plops down on the bed. "Can we get Skip The Dishes?"

It's such a strange request considering the circumstances, but I can't actually think of a good reason as to why not, so about ten minutes later, we're all sitting in a circle on the carpet, eating Chinese food from some local restaurant with a name we can't pronounce. 

"I can't believe my phone's still at 100%," Leif mentions. 

"Really?" Amber responds. "How?"

"Probably a glitch in the screen," Leif guesses. "This phone's getting old."

"How old is it?" asks Amber. 

"Four years."

"That's nothing," I chime in. "My dad bought a flip phone, because he wanted to get in touch with his former teen self. It takes him forever to respond to texts."

Eli laughs. "Your dad seems . . ."

"Wack," Leif finishes for him.

"I was gonna say interesting, but wack works too," Eli says. 

"Well, he's awesome," I say, "but he's kind of . . . in touch with nature. He and my mom are both kind of hippie-ish."

"Couldn't beat my mom," Eli says. "She's keeps a bunch of crystals and scented shit around the house."

"Your dad too?" I ask.

"Uh, no," Eli answers. "My dad's dead."

The conversation dies instantaneously. "I'm sorry for bringing it up," I say. 

Eli doesn't seem to be listening to me, for he starts explaining the circumstances of the tragedy. "He was shot by a cop. Made the mistake of getting in a fight with a white man, police showed up, and even after the fight broke up . . . You know how cops work; they see a black man and think he's a criminal."

Thank goodness for Leif who carries the conversation after that, because Amber and I both obviously have no idea how to respond. "His dad was the coolest. He was a teacher, and he taught my fourth grade class," Leif says.

"Did he help you get better grades or something?" Amber says.

"Nah, there was no helping me there," Leif replies. "He just gave out candy after every class."

"Were you guys in the same class?" I ask. 

"Not that year," Eli says. "Kids aren't allowed to be in their parents' classes."

"So how'd you two meet?" Amber wonders.

"Well, Eli is from Hungary," Leif explains. "He moved here in grade one, and he was the new kid in my class."

"I asked some kids if I could play with them at recess," Eli takes over, "but they wouldn't let me, so Leif came over and asked me if I knew how to play hacky sack. I said no, and he said he didn't either, and we've been best friends since that day."

"Then all the other kids were jealous," Leif adds, "because Eli gave me foreign candy."

"Leif, how many times do I have to tell you," Eli says, "jelly beans aren't foreign."

"Yeah, whatever."

Amber and I laugh. I find my eyes wandering over to hers, wanting to catch a glimpse of her smiling. 

"What about you two?" Eli asks. "How do you know each other?"

"Oh, um . . ." Amber's discomfort is audible in her voice, and probably visible too, but I'm not looking at her, opting to stare at the carpet instead. "She had this boyfriend when I was in grade 9, and she became friends with him."

"I assume this was before you knew you were a lesbian?" Leif comments. 

"Yeah," Amber says, stretching out the word awkwardly. 

Eli chuckles lightly. "When did you figure out you weren't into dudes?" 

Amber's eyes flick to me at the same time mine hit hers, then me both look away immediately. Neither of us want to relive this story. It hurts too much. 

"Um . . . I was friends with this girl," she starts. After a long pause of quiet, during which the boys give each other glances that acknowledge the sudden raise of air pressure in the room, Amber says, "Actually, I'm feeling kind of tired. I think I'm gonna go to sleep."

Amber picks up her empty take out box and utensils and brings them to the door perpendicular to the entrance, closing herself inside the bathroom, grabbing her duffle bag, which is now half as light, having already removed the glass case of snails. The tank now sits on the chest of drawers where a more expensive hotel would have a television. 

When I finish staring at where the girl disappeared, I turn back to Eli and Leif who are both looking at me in concern. 

"You good?" Eli asks. 

"Yeah, I'm fine," I reply. "I— I'm fine."

I don't know. I don't know anything at this point. I don't know if I ever knew anything, at least not where Amber is involved. 

_____________________________________

As I roll over, my eyes flutter open. It's well into the night now, but my mind's too jumbled to think. When I first wake up, I think for a second that maybe everything I remembered happening yesterday was just a dream, but the hard surface I'm lying on says otherwise. I stare into the dark, feeling overwhelmed with reality all over again, and that stress only gets worse when I realize Amber isn't next to me sleeping anymore. She didn't start there; She fell asleep on the opposite side of the room to avoid seeing me, but at some point in the night, I awoke to see her only a couple metres away from me, and I guess it must've been my grogginess acting, but I shifted a little closer. 

I sit up as though sparked by a sudden jolt of electric current. As I search the room, I notice that Eli's gone too, but a quick spin around shows him standing on the balcony. He was pretty restless all night, rolling around in the bed. He probably can't sleep. But Amber's not with him either, so I slide open the glass door and peek my head out.

"Hey, Eli, do you know where Amber is?" 

"Is she in the washroom?"

He's right. Of course. She's probably in the washroom. I'm overreacting, getting worked up over a non-existent problem. 

"I haven't checked, but you're probably right," I say, my worry falling. "You can't sleep, huh?"

"Nope," Eli replies. "My head's been too busy, and I have this migraine that won't go away."

"I have Tylenol in my bag."

"Thanks, but I already took some. Helped a bit."

"Okay, well, try to get some sleep."

"Been trying," he says. "Good night."

I seal the cold air back outside and walk quietly over to the bathroom. I want to let myself relax by seeing the proof of a light until the door crack. The lack of that sends my fear skyrocketing again. I whip open the door to the hallway and run out to look for her. 

"Amber!" I call. 

"Andi?" 

The response defuses the bomb of building worry, and I trace the path of the sound to find the girl curled up in a chair at the corner of the hallway. 

"Amber," I say, "why would you just leave like that?"

Amber shrugs. "Couldn't sleep. I assume you couldn't either"

"Well, you weren't there—" I stop myself, afraid finishing that sentence would make it come off in the wrong way. "You don't have a headache too, do you?" I ask instead. 

"No. Do you?"

"No, but Eli does."

"No headache," Amber assures me. "Just thinking."

"Me too."

She gives me a scan up and down then says, "Do you want to sit down to think?"

I look at the empty chair across from her and decide to take her suggestion. It's weirdly nostalgic sitting with her in the middle of the night right now. We're just a couple empty ice cream containers and a few Fall Out Boy CDs away from reenacting a good chunk of my memories with her. 

"When was the last time we were even in the same room together?" I wonder. 

"You mean without one of us trying to hide from the other?" Amber says. "I don't know. Probably about . . . a year ago."

"Yeah," I breathe.

"So are you gonna go back to hiding now? I mean, you found me. That's what you wanted, right?" The words sting, but not purposefully. Actually, she seems more sad than angry. 

"No," I reply. "I'd like to stay and talk to you—as long as you're okay with that."

She smiles and brings her feet up onto the chair to sit crisscross. 

"So, Bambi, what's on your mind?" 

That nickname. It makes me go speechless. What's on my mind right now? Everything. 

"Nothing I can pinpoint," I answer. "What are you thinking about?"

"Right now?"

I nod.

"I'm thinking about how I'd kill for a chair latte with oat milk."

"Wouldn't the killing contradict the whole vegan thing?"

"I'm vegan for the animals. I never said anything about humans," she replies. My laughter triggers hers, and she adds, "People are dumb anyway."

"I see you haven't lost your charm," I joke. 

She blushes at the compliment. She was always cute when she blushed. I never realized how much I've missed it until now.

She's about to respond when our sweet silence is shattered by the sound of a fire alarm ringing, and the building echoes with the stomping of its inhabitants waking up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I spent all day writing this, so I hope you like it and you're intrigued. Christmas Eve tomorrow! I'm excited. Also, I have three friends who are Pagan, and I think I'm gonna start reading about it and learning the religion. I probably won't be converting or anything, but I'd like to get more in touch with nature and stuff, and from what my friends have said, it seems neat. Anyway, have a dandy night, and I love yall!


	9. Chapter 9

Doors open, bringing in more people to the hallway as I run toward the stairwell. I feel Amber's hand reach for mine from behind me. It's cold to the touch, but I let her lock her fingers over finger to keep her from getting separated. The hotel's popularity is apparent when we get outside and there are only about another fifty or so people standing in the dark. Even though we're done moving, Amber doesn't let go of my hand, and because hers is so cold, I decide I should keep holding hers to warm it up. 

"Where are Eli and Leif?" Amber wonders.

Right on call, the boys emerge from the doors, lugging our bags along with them. They swing the sacks into our arms, forcing Amber and I to unlink our hands and catch the throws. 

"Here," Leif says. "We can't exactly afford to lose our shit in a fire."

"Wait," Amber says, examining the shape of her duffle bag. "My snails."

"Your snails had to take one for the team," Leif tells her. 

"What? Those are my babies! I need to go back for them!"

She starts walking, but I grab her arm and pull her back. "It's too late now," I tell her. 

"Andi, they're my children," Amber whines. "I love them. I birthed them."

"You didn't birth them. They're snails."

"Tomato, tomato."

"Excuse me." A man in a grey tweed suit steps out from within the crowd. "Would you four follow me?"

We all look at each other, not sure what's going on. 

"Follow you where?" I ask.

"I'm just going to sort out giving you a refund for your stay since this was such an inconvenience to you."

Makes enough sense. It is quite generous, and will certainly cost the hotel a lot of money to refund everyone here, but I guess they think the customer service will give them a good enough reputation that they'll get the business back in the future. 

He motions for us to follow him, and we do. He begins leading us away from the crowd and around the front of the hotel toward the back where the outdoor pool sits fenced in and surrounded by brown and dried up bushes. None of us question anything until Eli suddenly stops. The man doesn't notice and keeps walking ahead of us, but the rest of us all turn to Eli. 

"He got a message," Eli whispers. "We need to go."

We don't question how he knows, and we don't have time to, for the man has now realized our footsteps have stopped. When he turns around, the rest of us take off in the opposite direction. 

"Where are we going?" I question. 

Leif nods behind us. "Away from them!"

I take a glance behind me, and in that second, I catch sight of the man, along with two others, darting toward us, all holding firearms that I don't doubt they'll use on us. The shots start, and Amber screams, flinching as one of the shots hits the ground by her feet. As we both jump away from the spot, I realize it's not a bullet, but some kind of dart. What it does, I don't know. 

We're coming up on the corner of the building when we see two more people, one in a tan trench coat, and the other in black cargo pants and a vest, come out of hiding. As they raise their guns, we deviate to the right, following Amber even though there's nowhere to go. 

As we approach the building walls, I fear that she may be oblivious to the fact that we're gonna get cornered. 

"Amber . . ." I start, but right as I say that, she starts rising off the ground. At first I think she's floating, but then I notice the pearly white pillars forming beneath her feet. They aren't full structures, but instead they're made of thousands of thin strands of the sugar granule-like material, forming patterns like lace as the become steps for her to ascend up into the sky. 

My shock causes me to stumble a bit before remembering I need to keep going, and then I mirror her trail, stepping on the lacy platforms held up by the skinniest posts imaginable. I fear it might snap, but I don't have time to think too far into it. I chase Amber up onto a balcony where she climbs down onto the stone. Behind us, Eli and Leif finish their path upward, and the white steps dissolve into dust as the last person's foot leaves them.

When we're all up in the safety, I look at Amber with what I'm sure seems like terror. I am terrified. I'm terrified of what Amber just did, and I'm confused as to how. Weird things have been happening to all of us since the not-shooting, but nothing of this stature. 

"Amber . . ." is all I manage to say through my cluttered thoughts. 

"I have no idea," she responds as she lets out a breath. 

"I think your snails sensed your freak power trip," Leif says, pointing behind Amber.

On the railing, three tiny snails crawl along. When Amber sees them, her face brightens, and she reaches to scoop them up, placing them in the pockets of her duffle bag. 

I lean over the balcony railing to scan the ground. The hotel guests are gone, so they were either sent away or allowed back inside. The number of enemies has risen to almost twenty now, and one more is coming in a black van. The vehicle parks in the parking lot of the hotel, and two people step out and storm into the building. They're coming for us. 

"We need to get out of here," I say. 

"We'll steal their car, the one that just pulled up," Leif says. 

I start, "We're not—"

"Andi," Amber shouts. "This isn't the time to be a saint. We're stealing the car."

"Do you even know how to do that?" I ask Leif.

"There's a first time for everything," he replies. 

His unearned confidence is astounding, but before we can put it to the test, we need to get down from here. 

"Amber—"

"I'm working on it," she says to me. 

She holds her arms out over the railing, but nothing is happening. Suddenly, a crash sounds from inside the hotel room, and I glance back to see a woman with the same kind of bizarre dart gun entering in. 

"Amber!" I scream.

"Got it!"

The white particles drip from her hands, designing an intricately-patterned fire pole all the way down to the pavement. It looks like candy that's going to break as soon as she clasps her hands around it, but it stands stiff as she climbs over the edge of the balcony and spirals down to the ground, and the rest of us follow her lead. 

After Eli lands, the post disintegrates, and with most of our chasers inside the hotel, that leaves a mostly clear path for us to run toward the black van in the lot. Behind us, two men are still on our tails, but our twisty path is hard to track and predict, making their shots inaccurate. 

When we make it to the van, Eli tries the door. It's locked. Then Leif shoves him out of the way and grabs the handle himself. He yanks the door open without any effort. Eli must've not tried hard enough. Amber takes the driver's seat and unlocks the rest of the doors for us to get in. The car has a button which starts the engine, but we don't have the keys. The two guys who were shooting us are now getting close, and we don't have time for Amber's aimless fumbling of the buttons. 

"Let me get it!" Leif yells. 

He leans over and grabs the wheel, but the instant he touches it, the whole front dash flashes blue light, and a crackling sounds. Amber screams, and the engine mimics her, starting up. 

"What the fuck!" Leif shouts. 

We don't have time for confusion, the guys are two metres away and about to get us. Thankfully, the darts only dent the vehicle but can't penetrate it.

"Drive!" I yell. 

Amber stomps down on the gas, and we go zooming out of the parking lot, swerving around the people with the guns, and zipping out onto town road. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's hard to write action. I've never done it before, so sorry if it's bad. Anyway, I'm gonna try to get the next chapter up tomorrow or saturday. Probably saturday, because there's a protest against the concentration camps in China tomorrow that I'm attending. Anyway, have a good day and happy winter break.


	10. Chapter 10

Amber drives down the highway, getting a little closer to where we need to get, although we're still nowhere close. Leif messes with the dial on the radio, skipping through the stations, causing them all to blend together into a buzz. I'm watching Eli's leg bounce and his eyes twitch every time the channel changes until he finally can't take it anymore. 

"Turn to 94.7!" he orders. 

Leif gives it a try, and the station settles on the alternative rock station. Leif looks back at Eli in surprise. 

"How'd you know?" 

"I heard it," Eli answers. "I can hear them all. Can see things too, like TV channels and phone emails and texts. Oh, and I can hear this one lady yelling at her husband over the phone. He's right if you ask me."

"Obviously something happened to all of us," Amber says. "And using reasonable deduction, I figure it was probably during the not-shooting."

"Do you think that's what happened to Adam?" Leif hypothesizes. "When they took him to the hospital because they thought he was sick, and none of the doctors said what was wrong with him. Maybe he was showing signs of some abnormal ability like us." 

"And maybe that's why they're bringing us to that boarding school," Amber joins in. "To control us and make sure we don't get out of hand."

"That's so dystopian," Leif mutters. 

"If we have super powers," Amber goes on, "then we need to learn how to use them."

I can see her face in the mirror clear enough to see that she has an idea. 

"What are you thinking?" I question. 

Rather than respond, she takes the next turn off, driving the van out onto a dirt road. Soon, budding trees surround us on both sides, and the only sign of civilization we pass is a tiny wooden barn and house to match, both so run down that I doubt anyone still lives there. Amber winds the twisty path until we run out of road and stop in the middle of a forest.

She punches the button that turns off the car and swings open the door. The rest of us join her outside the vehicle, waiting for her explanation of what she's doing. 

Amber tilts her head upward, takes a breath, and spins around in a circle. She opens her eyes then looks back at us with a grin. 

"What's the funky dance about?" Leif questions. 

"It's not a dance," Amber says. "I'm focusing my energy."

"Right, okay."

"We need to practice," Amber says. "We need to know how to use our abilities for our advantage in the case that we have to get away from people like we just had to again."

She outstretches her arms and aims them at the tree ahead of her. She narrows her eyes, focusing on the plant, trying to activate her power, but while she's busy looking forward, white starts to solidify like snow by her feet. It spreads out like crystallizing ice, and I wander over to kneel down to touch it. It's not cold. 

"Amber," I say as I stand back up.

She breaks her focus, and the white coating dissolves immediately. She spins around to face me, looking disappointed.

"It didn't work," she huffs.

"No, it worked," I deny. "You had a crystal building under your shoes."

"Really? Well, I guess that's a place to start."

She turns back around and continues her attempts to build something where she actually wants it to be. After a creating a few clusters of lace on branches diagonal from where she intended them to be, Leif decides to step up. 

"Mind if I take a shot?" he asks.

"Go for it Sparky," Amber says.

Sparky: a reference to what he does next. With just a huff and swing of his arm, the tree before him flashes so bright I have to cover my eyes, and a crackle like thunder rings. When I look again, all the buds on the tree are brown and shrivelled, and thin black veins stripe its trunk. If it were a person, it'd be dead. 

"Okay," Amber reacts, "I'm gonna give you some space."

She steps back out of the way of Leif and finds her own place well away from the boy. While the Amber and Leif continue practicing directing their powers, Eli sits in the hood of the car, passing the time with his phone, but I wander off to find my own spot in the woods. 

There, I lower down and lie on the grass, thinking about something Cyrus once taught me. Close your eyes. Breathe in. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out. Now tense up all the muscles in your body. Then release. Now you feel calm. The only problem is I can't feel calm, because now I'm thinking about Cyrus and all my friends who may or may not be in danger, and we're here in the middle of nowhere with no clue about anything going on, and everyone has these crazy supernatural abilities—everyone except me. 

The ground rustles to my left, and I open my eyes to look over at Amber getting down next to me. As her back falls onto the grass, her hands brushes mine, and she tilts her head toward me. 

"I see you're hard at work," she says. 

"I see you are too."

She giggles and scooches a bit closer so that her shoulder is touching mine.

"You haven't said much yet," Amber says, "about what you can do."

"That would be," I reply, "because I can't do anything."

"Not true," she counters. 

"Right, because you've seen me fly and pick up cars and light things on fire," I respond in sarcasm. 

She sighs. "You chose the most basic powers. Surely you must be able to do something."

"I'm not like you guys," I insist. "I'm normal."

"That's it." She pushes herself onto her feet and holds her hand out for me. "Stand up." 

I take her hand, and she pulls me up. 

Then she puts her hands on both of my shoulders as says, "Andi Mack is anything but normal."

I furrow my brows, although I can't help my smile. "Is that a compliment?"

She holds her eyes to mine for another second before moving them away. "Here." 

She reaches for my hand and lifts it up, unfolding my palm flat. A tinkle follows her finger on my palm as it spirals around. Slowly, the white particles form under her hand, growing larger. When she's done, she removes her hand to uncover a shiny star with rounded edges. I roll it around in my hand, smiling uncontrollably. 

"What's this?" I ask.

"It's you," she replies. 

"A star?"

"Exactly." She grins. "It's the only thing I can make yet."

I nod and slip the star into my pocket, then a question pops into my head. 

"How long is it going to stay solid?" I wonder.

She shrugs. "Who knows. The sugar stays when it wants to stay."

I look at her in astonishment. She has this looseness that allows her to wrap around any situation that comes her way, and she's comfortable with not knowing. That's something I'm not good at. I need certainty, knowledge of what's going to happen and what I should expect. She's the exact opposite of that, and maybe that's why she scares me.

"I don't understand you sometimes," I say. 

"Not understanding things isn't a bad thing," she counters.

"I'm not fond of it," I say.

"Hmm." She cracks a charming smile. "Well, I thought you were kind of starting to like me."

I look down at my hands, not sure how to respond. So I don't. Instead I take a step back. I open my mouth to say something to explain that I'm going to go find Eli and see how he's doing, but my shortness of breath hinders me from doing so, and I instead simply smile, laugh nervously, turn around, and walk away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. I had an idea for an original story that I've been working on. Plus, I'm thinking of ideas for HSMTMTS stories next. Also, I'm starting school soon, so I'm not looking forward to that. Anyway, I love you all, and Happy New Year!


	11. Chapter 11

I see Eli sitting on the hood of the van, and I climb up to join him. He doesn't notice me at first, too wrapped in whatever is happening on his phone screen. 

"Hey," I say.

He glances up at me briefly before returning to his phone. "Not with Amber? I'm surprised."

The girl comes by as he speaks, looking at me before going over to where Leif is busy trying to harness his electricity. I end up having to pull my stare away as she leaves. 

"We're not friends, you know," I state.

"Could've fooled me," Eli mutters. 

While he focuses on his device, I take out my own phone and open up the photos app. I scroll back in my timeline about a year to find a peculiar lack of images from that time. Then I remember why. I deleted all those photos. So instead, I go to the next best thing. 

"You know stalking her instagram won't fix your relationship," Eli mutters. 

I flinch to hide my phone, but he's not even looking at it. He's still looking at his own. 

"How did you . . .?"

"It's in my head," he answers. "Everything's in my head. I feel like I'm walking past one of those TV walls as Best Buy, but I can't walk away. There's so much that I can hardly focus on any one thing."

"But my personal business is an exception?" I sneer. 

"Since when is Amber's social media _your_ business?" He chuckles at my embarrassment. "I'm not choosing to see what you're doing. It's just really . . . loud. Probably because you're next to me."

I lock my phone and put it down on the van hood, then I lift my legs up to sit crisscross. In the distance, I watch as Amber ensembles stalagmites of white from the ground. Upon them, I notice three tiny brown specks crawling up the formations. They linger on the tips of the spikes. When Amber reaches out to form a bridge of of white between her and each speck, and they start crawling closer to her, I realize the specks are her snails. They find a home on her shoulders, staying there while Amber continues practicing her ability. 

Eli, who watched the whole scenario too, looks at me and says, "I know what you and a snail have in common."

"What?" 

"You both like Amber but don't say it."

_______________________________________

My eyes flutter open to the sight of Amber steering the car from the seat next to mine. I have an ache in my shoulder from being twisted up asleep. Blue sky is starting to peak though the golden tint of morning. The light makes Amber's blonde hair appear to glow. She soon notices me staring at her and glances briefly from the road. 

"Morning, Sleeping Beauty," Amber's singsong voice says. 

As I examine her closer, I notice something new. White lacy vines wrap her arms like string, and upon them are little snails gliding peacefully around the shapes. 

"Do they live there now?" I ask. 

"They seem to like the sugar lace," she replies.

"It's not actual sugar, right?"

"No," she answers, "but I don't know what else to call it."

"Sugar lace it is," I say softly. 

I peer through the space below my headrest to see that the boys are both still asleep. Amber must be exhausted. She hasn't had the chance to sleep at all yet. 

"Are you tired?" I ask. "Do you want to switch? I can drive for a bit."

"You have your licence now?" 

"I got it a week after my birthday," I reply. 

"Huh," she mumbles. "No, it's fine. Driving keeps my mind off other things."

"Other things like . . ."

She lists her answers, "My brother, my parents, Iris . . ." Her ending sounds like she has more to add, but she stops there anyway. 

"Okay," I say. 

Another 10 or so miles down the road, we start to run low on gas, so we turn off into the nearest town to fill up. There's only one gas station, and it has only one pump, which looks like it was built in the '80s. The uncovered machine used to be painted a sky blue, but now most of the paint is chipped away, and the metal is rusted from years of weather. 

Leif and Eli remain in their slumber as Amber shuts off the engine. She shoves open her door, and I climb out my own side. I join her at the gas pump where we both scan it up and down, trying to figure out how it works. There's no screen. No buttons. Just tube with a handle connected to a big box. 

"Must be pay inside?" Amber guesses. 

She sighs and starts toward the tiny building. I follow her up to the cream-coloured door that looks like it could fall off at any moment. In the one window beside it, blinds are closed, but no light shines through, causing me to question if it's even open. In fact, I've been questioning if anything in this town was open since driving in here. The streets are silent, without even an ant walking around. The houses are all still with cars parked in front that are covered in mud like they haven't been driven in weeks, and the lawns are uncut, feeding a huge population of weeds.

Amber tries the doorknob. With just a tap, the door creaks open, leading the two of us into a dark convenience shop. I step over to open the blinds to allow some light into the space. Dust hovering in the air is the only movement besides us. No one stands at the counter. Shelves remain fully stocked with expiration dates long passed. 

"Looks like we'll have to get gas somewhere else," Amber concludes. 

Right as we're about to go out again, I spot a van just like ours pulling up outside the window. I grab Amber's wrist and pull her away from the door which she was about to go out. Two women in dress pants and blazers step out of the vehicle. I'm suddenly really thankful for our van's tinted windows and the fact that Leif and Eli are practically lying on the seat, making them invisible from the sight lines of the women. 

"Fuck," Amber mutters. 

She wraps her hand through mine and pulls me between two shelves where we crouch down and shut up. I'm staring at bags of stale chips on the shelf ahead of me. My blindness to the people causing the door to creak again causes my fear to inflate rapidly. I squeeze Amber's hand as I wait for the footsteps to get closer to us.

A gunshot shatters the silence, only doesn't come from the direction of the footsteps. It comes from the back of the store. I can feel Amber shaking beside me. One more bang sounds. The footsteps are gone. But we aren't alone. 

I'm too afraid to stand up and see the situation for myself, but Amber isn't. She rises onto her feet, her eyes falling on something at the back of the store, likely the source of the gunshots. She taps my shoulder, signaling for me to stand too, and although hesitant, I trust her. What I see is the opposite of the terrifying adult I expected. It's two teenagers. A boy with shaggy hair, jet black as his peacoat, skin like caramel, and thick eyebrows that come to a peculiar point in the centre of each, leans against the cement wall. Beside him, a girl sits atop a large chest freezer with one leg up and one dangling over the edge. Her long, coffee-coloured curls hang free from various points along her messy French braid. She wears a tan cargo vest, and her black jeans are torn at the knees. The crimson scars behind the strands of peeling fabric tell me that the rips are not intentional. 

Over the shelf behind me, two bodies lay limp, their blood staining the grout of the floor tile. That those women were moving a minute ago and are now not is a hard concept for me to wrap my head around. 

A clink rings as the boy sets his gun down on the freezer top. Then his brings his chin back up, landing his sharp eyes on me and Amber. 

"So," he says, "you're not gonna say thank you?" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually really loved writing this chapter. I'm excited for y'all to read more. I'm writing a Redlyn fic soon. I'll probably have the first chapter of that out tomorrow, so make sure to check that out if you like HSMTMTS. Please! I'm so excited to write it, because it's gonna be a ton of fluff, which I haven't written in a while. I was gonna start with a Seblos fic, but I decided to write the Redlyn one first, because I'm still planning the Seblos story. Anyway, I love you all, and have a good night!


	12. Chapter 12

Thank you? For killing two people? Is he insane? Is he soulless? Is there a difference?

"Who are you?" I question. 

"We should ask you the same thing," the boy responds. "Two teenagers, probably in high school, somehow ended up here by accident. Is that your story?"

"What story?" Amber retorts. "That's what happened."

The girl slides down from the freezer. Standing at her full height now, I realize she can't be taller than five feet. Her boots clack as she saunters around the shelves and over to us, stopping in front of us with her arms folded.

"Were you with them?" She nods to the two bodies on the floor, the ones I don't have the stomach to look at again. 

"No," Amber answers. 

"Then how'd you find us?" 

Us? As in her and the boy? Why is she paranoid about people finding them? What are hiding from? 

"Look," Amber says, "we were just driving, and we stopped here to get gas. That's it."

"You had trackers following you. That means you're either one of them or you're one of us, and considering the way you both failed to put up any fight, I'm doubtful that it's the latter."

"One of you?" I say. "What are you?"

She shakes her head, strolling back to where her friend stands. They share a glance as though communicated with just the look, and the boy seems to understand what she's trying to say. He nods and turns his chin to us, taking a different route in his questioning. 

"Which school did you come from?" he asks.

The librarian's words echo in my head. _Don't tell people who you are._ But these people just shot two women dead, and I'm not too confident that they wouldn't do the same to me and Amber if we posed a threat. 

"Grant High School," I reply. 

Both of their eyes snap together, like my response flipped a sudden switch of realization. 

"The fourth," I hear the girl whisper. 

"What?" I say. "What are you talking about?"

She ignores my question, asking instead, "How'd you two escape?"

"We missed the busses," Amber answers for me, "and the person who was driving us was murdered."

The boy speaks up, telling us, "You're lucky."

"How?" I counter. "We're being chased by people who want us for some reason, and we could've been at the school by now if—"

"You don't want to be there," he cuts me off. Then he finally introduces himself. "I'm Alistair, and this is Amina."

"I'm Amber, and she's Andi."

Alistair gives us a slow nod. "You're lucky you found us, although I'm not happy about you leading trackers here."

"Why? Are you hiding here?" I question. "And what are trackers?"

"Trackers are the people who've been chasing you," Amina answers. "And we're not hiding. We're gathering, training—and hiding, yeah."

"Training for what?"

"Your school tried to send you to a boarding school for your protection, right?"

I nod.

"It's all bullshit," Amina states. "They schools don't want to protect you. They want to keep you away from the public, so that they can exploit your abilities for their own benefit."

"What would a school want to use us for?" Amber asks.

"Not the school," Amina says. "The government. Think about it. They've somehow managed to keep the media quiet on what's happening to all the kids from the schools that have had the intruders that didn't do anything aside from give us all abnormal abilities. They didn't even tell you or your parents where the boarding school you're being brought to is."

"Wait, so you think the government is behind all of this?" I query. "They planned the not-shooting in order to use us as what? Some kind of weapon? You know this for sure?"

Amina shrugs, an eyebrow up. "We've had people come to us who have escaped from their schools. We had our suspicions, but what they told us confirmed them. Forced us to face the fact that the world isn't a fantasy where everyone cares for everyone. Sometimes, you can only trust yourself and those like you."

"Okay, rewind a bit," Amber speaks up. "You guys are like us? You can do weird things too?"

Rather than answer verbally, Alistair directs his stare to the left of us, and a second later, a chip bag bursting makes Amber and I scream as we look over as see the plastic melting around the flaming chip insides. A moment later, the fire's out, and the plastic refreezes mid-drip off the edge of the shelf. 

"He likes to show off," Amina says. 

Then she shows that she obviously doesn't have anything against showing off, for she simply touches a cracked picture frame on the wall behind her, and it falls to a drip, only it doesn't steam or smoke the way Alistair's chip bag did. The frame just changes into a liquid in an instant. She kneels down to the floor where the puddle is, and, with a tap of her finger, it disappears, leaving a brown gas in its place. Amina barely leaves the gas there for a second before changing it into a million solid grains of brown that drop to the ground. 

"Dangerous to breathe that in," Amina explains. Then she smiles and says, "Your turn."

Amber doesn't do much other than hold our her arm to let the snails crawl from her back down to her hands, following the white vines like roadways. 

"You talk to snails?" Amina asks. 

"No," Amber puffs. 

She unfolds her palm, sending out a beam of sugar lace up to the roof. The white expands like a splat on the ceiling. When Amber removes her hand from the bottom, the structure stays intact. Alistair and Amina stare up at the anomaly.

After a few seconds, Alistair turns his eyes back to Amber, saying, "Would've been cool if you could talk to snails, but that's cool too." Then he nods to me. "What about you?"

"Oh, I don't do anything," I say. "I can't."

"Were you not at the school during the lockdown?" Amina questions.

"I was," I insist. "I don't know why. I just can't do anything special."

"It'll come," Alistair tells me. "Everyone gets some abnormality."

"So you know a lot of kids like us?" Amber asks. 

"We do," Amina answers. "They come to us, because they know we're the only way to help those in the boarding schools."

"My brother is in one of those," Amber says. 

"I'm sorry," Amina responds. 

"How do you guys help the ones in the schools?" Amber pries. 

"That information is reserved for those who join us," Alistair says. 

Amber looks at me, and she doesn't need to say anything for me to know what she's thinking. And I don't need to reply. She knows I agree. If the schools really are bad, then we can't go there, but we can't leave the others. This is the third option I've been hoping for. We can save them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to longer, but I felt like this was a good place to cut it off. The next few chapter will be interesting (I always say that). I'm excited, because we're getting closer to the end. We're probably about halfway through, and this is just the first book. I'm excited to show y'all the rest. School's started again, so I'll try to keep up with posting regularly, but please forgive me if I miss a day. It's busy. Have a good night!


	13. Chapter 13

Imagine what you'd picture a haunted hotel to look like. Does it include cobwebbed light fixtures too high for anyone to clean without a ladder, cracked mirrors holding together by pure luck, a creaky floor that makes it impossible to take one step without announcing your arrival? Does it look like you've stepped into a Scooby-Doo episode from the seventies? This picture I've described is only the start of the location Amina and Alistair call headquarters. It was a hotel at one point when the town used to have anyone living in it. Now these kids have repurposed it to use as a place where they eat, sleep, train, and live, away from those they view as being a possible threat. 

Alistair leads us from room to room, explaining the purpose of them all. I trail along at the back with Eli, eyeing Amber walking alongside Amina ahead of Eli. Amber seems to have dived headfirst into this commitment, even though we hardly know these people. We basically only know their names and that they are good at aiming. Somehow that's enough for Amber to trust them. Maybe it's just because they claim they can help TJ, and Amber would do anything for her little brother. She's always been really protective of him, even when he doesn't want her help. She's stepped back a bit, because he's old enough to handle himself, but that didn't stop her from caring.

We enter what must've been a restaurant at one point. There are at least thirty tables scattered around the floor. A chandelier dangles nervously above the bar counter, its glass crystals looking ready to jump at the slightest tap. 

"Here's the dining room," Alistair says. "At the back is the kitchen where the meals are prepared. We take turns doing that."

"Where do you get the food from?" Amber asks. "You're in the middle of nowhere."

"We have a garden," Amina answers. "And Marcus, who'll I'm sure you'll meet later, can manipulate the growth of plants."

"Reminds me of that girl in Sky High," Leif comments. 

"Not quite the same, but it's similar," Alistair responds. "Supper will be here at seven, and since you've chosen to stay, I'll show you up the stairs to your room."

As he takes us up the stairs, Amina and Amber get lost in their own conversation, starting with a compliment. 

"I love your bracelet," Amber says to Amina. 

I can't see the jewelry piece from behind them, but from what I can tell, the bracelet looks to be a gold piece of metal with some kind of engraved design in it. 

"Thanks," Amina says. "It was a gift from my grandma. I got it when I started high school. Now I don't take it off."

"That's so sweet," Amber says. "What's the design?"

"It's Arabic for 'Keep dreaming, brave girl.'" 

"You speak Arabic?" 

"And Spanish," Amina explains. "My mom's side is from Jordan and my dad's is from Mexico. My family never spoke the languages much, but I spent a lot of time at my grandma's house, and she spoke a lot in Arabic."

"Wow. My family just spoke English. I know a bit of ASL because my friend's brother is deaf, but that's about as far as my language knowledge extends," Amber says.

I didn't know Amber could speak sign language. I guess there's probably lots of things I don't know about her, because she certainly didn't tell me everything. Either that or I just never bothered to ask. I wish I had asked. 

I watch as the girls ahead giggle and chatter as we start down a long hallway. Rather than looking at them, Eli's paying attention to me, noticing something in my demeanour that interests him.

"She's probably straight," he whispers to me. 

I whip my focus to him. "Am I that obvious?"

"Very," he confirms. 

I look ahead again, but this time my eyes fall downward, and I notice something that I mention to Eli. "Her jeans are cuffed."

"What's that have to do with anything?" Eli asks. 

I shake my head, not even bothering to address his question. 

Alistair stop and spins around, gesturing to an open door on the left. "Here is where you can all stay."

Amber comes over to me, and I brighten for a second, but what she has to say makes that twinkle dim instantly. 

"Can you put my bag inside?" she asks. "Amina's going to show me something in her room."

"Oh," I respond. "Yeah, sure, I guess."

She smiles. "Thanks."

She shoves the yellow duffle bag into my hands before scurrying off with her new friend. I turn and follow Eli and Leif into our room. Thick, burgundy drapes frame the window. There is no balcony, just frosted glass—which upon closer inspection may not be intentionally frosted. It's actually just years of grime built up. The beds, however look somewhat clean. They must take care of the furniture for when they do have new occupants. The white sheets are yellow from age, but they look clean. The victorian-style pattern of the carpet, although stomped flat, is still vibrant. 

I head over to the far bed and drop Amber's duffle bag down on it. I consider for a moment putting my bag next to it, but I pivot to toss it on the other bed instead. 

"What're you doing?" Eli questions. 

"Her and Leif are better friends," I reply. "Makes more sense for them to share."

Eli rolls his eyes before grabbing Amber's bag and plops it onto the bed I claimed for myself. 

"I'm not sharing you with you," Eli says with a smirk. "You move around a lot in your sleep." I give him a glare, but he ignores it, saying, "Looks like you and Amber will just have to learn to get along."

I spin around, crossing my arms firmly over my chest as I watch him set his own stuff down on his bed. Meanwhile, Leif explores his way out of the room, saying he's going to look for a washroom. Now it's just me and Eli. Like he can feel my scowl behind him, he looks back.

"You mad at me or something?" Eli asks.

"I just don't understand why you want to annoy me," I huff.

"What I don't understand is what's the deal with you and Amber?" 

That renders me silent, and I sink down onto the soft quilt of my bed. Eli wanders over to his own and sits down across from me, waiting for my response. I've never told anyone this story. I always wanted to pretend it never happened, or that it happened different than it did. But even the strongest stones weather eventually. 

"We were best friends," I say. "We did everything together." 

Eli listens quietly as I reminisce, letting every word float aimlessly as my story pieces itself together. 

"I never expected we'd get as close as we did. I spent more time with her than I did with any of my friends. Then one time, we were watching a movie at her house—Cheaper By The Dozen 2—and she told me something that freaked me out. She told me she had a crush on me."

"That scared you?" Eli says. "You couldn't just move on and stay friends?"

"No. It wasn't her liking me that scared me. It was that I liked her. I liked her a lot, and that terrified me. So I left and stopped talking to her completely."

Eli leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees, putting his hands together. "Okay," he says, "so now that you've recognized your mistake, don't you think you should maybe stop pushing her away?"

"I'm not," I argue. "She's just moved on. I can't expect her to still like me after what I did."

"Well," Eli says, "you'll never know unless you tell her."

I look down, not wanting to acknowledge his recommendation. Telling her the truth now just seems mute at this point. I doubt she likes me anymore, and what does that make me if I like her? Gay? Bi? Pan? Straight with a twist? 

I stand up and say, "I'm gonna go talk to Alistair to see what their plan is to help the kids still in the boarding schools."

"At least you're being productive while avoiding your feelings," he replies.

I depart the room, letting his comment hang without response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I expected this chapter to turn out way shorter, so I'm happy it's as long as it is. I'm currently watching Indiana Jones. Entertaining movies, but super wack. I love the HSMTMTS finale. I'm looking froward to seeing Seblos develop in the second season. Maybe we'll actually get a kiss. Tyrus didn't, so maybe Seblos can. I love you all, and have a good weekend!


	14. Chapter 14

The main floor is busy, people rushing from room to room. I walk the corridor, looking for Alistair, seeing as he's the only person I know here, but I only find a lot of closed doors, behind which are conjunctions of laughing, chatter, and a few loud bangs. I assume someone must be practicing their power. Either that or they're extremely clumsy and someone keeps dropping things at a force greater than gravity. 

At the end of the hall, I find a door leading into a stairway. The entire column is lit by one red flickering lamp, but it's enough to see the steps extending downward. There's no way up from here, so I weigh my one option and settle upon going down. 

The basement is only barely brighter than the stairwell. Caged lights hang from the ceiling, which has exposed pipes running along it. This space is much quieter than the upper part of the hotel. I can hear the sounds of rushing water, letting me know whenever a toilet is flushed. As I wander down the tunnel, noise of metal clinking comes into range, and I come up to an open doorway into what looks like the boiler room. 

Inside, I see the source of the noise working at a table with a toolkit and a bunch of scraps of metal and wires. I can only see them from the back, since they're facing away from the door, but the patches clouding the back of their denim vest give me a pretty good sense of who they are. They like Alex The Astronaut and Nutella, they support climate action, and they use they/them pronouns. 

I walk up to get a better view of them. A strand of short, sandy blonde hair falls over their right eye, but the impaired sight doesn't shake their focus, for they remain bent over their work until I accidentally bump into the table behind me, and they snap their eyes up to me. 

"Hello," they say, blank-faced.

"Hi, sorry, um, I'm Andi. I was just looking around. I don't want to distract you."

"Your entrance was pretty loud," the person says frankly, "so I hate to tell you, but you aren't doing too hot."

They don't seem annoyed at all, just blunt, and they continue using a tiny pair of pliers to manipulate the parts inside what looks like a less exciting version of a Nintendo Switch. They seem to be ignoring my presence entirely, so I figure I should leave them be, but right as I'm about to take a step, they speak up.

"I'm River."

They finish tampering with the device and push their chair away from the table, rolling back and lifting their ankle up to rest on their opposite knee. 

"I was just working on something for the mission crew," they explain. "But I'm not going to figure it out anyway. What's up?"

"What is it?" I ask. "The thing you're working on."

"I'm trying to make a device that can pick up various frequencies and gather data of other devices nearby for the teams to use when they go to the schools."

"Sounds like something I'm too under-qualified to understand," I say with a laugh. 

"No, me too," they say. "Hence why I've given up to talk to you. You're one of the people who came this morning, right?"

"Yeah," I say. "What about you? When did you get here?"

"About three days ago," River answers. "I escaped my school. Kingston High. Alistair saved me from being killed by a tracker at a bike rental shop."

"You escaped your school?" They're one of the ones Amina and Alistair was talking about. They've seen inside, and they can confirm or deny what I'm still having a hard time believing. "Was it bad there?"

"It didn't start bad," River says. "At first, it was classes as usual with just a lot of check ups from the nurses. But then one day, they got a bunch of new staff, and they put all these new restrictions on us. We couldn't go outside unless supervised by one of them, and even then, it was only to cross buildings. Punishments became harsher. If you did anything so much as speak without being asked, you were put into what we called the blank room."

"What was that?"

"It was basically just a room with nothing in it, completely blank. No lighting either. And you had to stay there for as long as it took."

"As long as it took for what?"

"For you to go crazy. You may not think it's that bad, but being confined, empty in a space like that is spirit-breaking. That's only one of the punishments they used. Some kids had to help in the nurses' centre, which had turned into some kind testing lab for the kids, doing all sorts of weird and painful experiments. The new teachers could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Some kids were hit, others had to eat disgusting food, and others had to clean floors with toothbrushes.

"We didn't have classes anymore either. Instead, it was training 24/7. They wanted us to use our abilities now, but only when they were watching. Some kids thought they were training us to be used as some kind of weapon for war."

I don't know why I'm so shaken. I knew what they were going to say—or at least I knew it wasn't going to be good. But even though Alistair and Amina already told me the schools were bad, I couldn't really wrap my head around it. Miss Dancy seemed like she was telling the truth when she said we would be safe at the school. Were her dying words wasted on a lie? Maybe that was part of the fun for her, making us scramble to be broken. Something about that possibility just doesn't sit right with the evidence presented to me now, but I have no valid reason to question what River's saying. What would they gain out of lying anyway? They're in the same place as me. They're just trying to get through this mess one breath at a time.

"Do you know how they're going to get them out?" I ask after a moment of pondering. 

"Get the kids out? Well, I can't tell you it all—it involves a lot of separate parts that I don't have the time or motivation to explain—but the general premise is that we need people to get people into the schools and pose as students to transmit information back to here so that we can have an idea of what to be prepared for when the rest of the team goes in to get everyone out."

"How many schools have you already freed?" 

"None," River says, seeming surprised by the question. "Our first mission is supposed to happen soon, though."

"So you haven't actually tried it yet?" I respond. "How do you know it will work?"

"I don't," River replies, "but I have reasonable confidence. Well, more like optimistic confidence."

"What happens if it doesn't work?" I ask.

River lets out a sigh. "Best case scenario, everyone's captured and put back in the schools. Worse case, they're killed. I'm hoping neither of those happen."

______________________________________

I'm one of the first ones to enter the dining room in the morning. Only a few others are already here, conversing in separate pods at different tables. The only person here whom I know is Leif, who sits reading some comic book that looks like it's at least thirty years old. He greets me with a nod as I go over and join him at his table. 

Leif, who looks so unfazed by everything happening in his life, is the complete opposite of me. I could hardly sleep at all in the night. Well, I probably slept better than Eli, who's still struggling to get a full hour of undisturbed slumber. Still, I was kept up by my overly-stuffed thoughts. I kept seeing Miss Dancy's face and hearing her words, and then hearing River's story, and none of it made sense put together. 

"Leif," I say, "why would Miss Dancy tell us that the schools would help us if she knew they were bad?"

"Maybe she didn't know. Or maybe she's working with the other at the school, and her job was to tell us that."

"Yeah, but how invested in your job do you have to be to work while you're dying?" 

He just shrugs in response and quickly moves on to a different topic. "Training was intense yesterday. I spent a lot of time working to aim my electricity at targets and work on powering appliances without blowing them right away. I also learned some fighting stuff. I knew a lot of it already, 'cause I took mixed martial arts when I was younger, but I never learned how to shoot."

"Shoot?" I exclaim. "Like, a gun?"

He nods. "Yes, Andi. A gun."

I don't like the thought of him with a gun, but I especially don't like the picture of Amber holding a gun which comes to me when I see her sit down in the empty chair beside me. But she won't have to use it, right? She's helping, but she's not going to be one of the people on the missions directly fighting those people running the boarding schools, so she will only ever have to learn to shoot for practice, not to actually hurt someone. 

"Hey, guys," she says. "I have great news. I'm going on the first mission to release Grant."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hola, friends. I've got the next three chapters already planned, so I'm excited for that. Also, I had a dream last night, and I'm using it as the inspiration for my next story after I'm done with Firefly. It will be a Gini story (Gina and Nini), and in my dream it was pretty good, so I'm thinking I'll really like writing it in real life too. Love you all! Bye!


	15. Chapter 15

"You're kidding," I say bluntly.

Amber furrows her brows. She clearly wasn't expecting that to be my response.

"No, I'm going to help save my brother," she says.

"Good on you," Leif praises

He reaches across to give Amber a fist bump, but my death glare makes him shrivel back.

"Andi, what's your problem?" Amber questions.

"My problem is you could get seriously hurt or even killed."

She huffs, shaking her head. "Look, I don't have time to argue with you. Is it cool if Amina joins us for breakfast? She's going to tell me more about the first mission and what I should prepare for."

"Yeah, sure," Leif answers before I can get even more upset.

"Awesome," Amber says. "I'll pull up a chair."

"Don't worry about it," I grumble. "She can have mine."

I push my chair out, its legs making a deafening scream as they scratch the floor, and stand up. I can't be around her when she's making such a reckless decision, and I certainly don't want to see Amina. Amber and Leif both watch me as I spin around and walk off, but neither care enough to say anything.

_____________________________________

River looks as though they haven't moved at all since yesterday. They're in the same spot, working on the same device. As I walk over to their table, they let out a groan and put their face in their hands.

"Not working?" I ask.

Their hands fall down to the table as they look up at me. "I don't have the right materials to make my vision. Right now, I can basically make the equivalent of a cell phone, but I can't get it to pick up anything except the radio."

Suddenly, the screen lights up, and River's eyes go wide as some very pixelated cooking show flickers on then disappears.

"Did you do that?" I wonder.

River shakes their head.

"Wait, then who—?"

That's when I notice Eli standing in the doorway, and I realize the connection. He's holding a plate of hash browns with grilled mushrooms and tomatoes alongside.

"Hey," he says. "Amber told me you didn't want to eat with her, so I brought you some breakfast. Sorry, it's not much. It's just whatever was left over."

He comes over to give me the plate, and I stare at it for a moment in my hands, feeling a bit like I want to cry, but I'm not sure why. Amber thinks I just don't want to be around her, and I guess I don't, not when she's around Amina. I haven't even talked to Amina that much, but I already don't like her. And Eli, he's supporting my emotional decision to keep fucking things up with her by bringing me breakfast so that I can continue to avoid her. He's a true friend.

"Thanks," I say instead, not letting my feelings take control.

He passes me a fork, and I accept it with a smile.

"Eli," I say, bringing my head back to where it needs to be, "can you think about a TV channel?"

"Um . . . sure?"

He focuses his eyes upward, and the device screen zaps back on in River's hands, and River's jaw drops.

"That's it!"

"What's what?" Eli asks.

The second he speaks, the screen goes black again, but River's excitement level is blazing, and they leap out of their chair.

"Can you do that with more than just TV stations?" River asks.

"Do what?"

"Eli," I say, "you made that screen turn to the station you were thinking of."

He shakes his head in denial. "No. I can't do that. I can only see it in my head."

"You can do more than just that," I tell him.

"Eli," River says, "I'm River."

Eli shakes the person's hand when they stick it out, and River pulls it away almost immediately after, getting right back to business.

"Are you planning on being part of the mission to Grant?"

"I hadn't thought about it," Eli admits.

"Well, you may be our best way of intercepting and transmitting information from there to here, so I very much hope you will."

Eli looks like a deer in the headlights, confused as to what he just got himself into.

"I've never practiced before," Eli says.

"Let's practice now, then," River says.

They take a seat down in their chair again, and I hop up onto the tabletop behind me, ready to see how this goes.

"Can you hear phone calls or see emails or things like that?" River asks.

"Yeah—"

"Cool, pick one."

River focuses intently on the screen, and Eli closes his eyes. At first, nothing happens, and River's frustration is apparent.

"I told you," Eli says. "I can't control it."

"Wrong," River squawks back. "Try again."

Another minute of nothing, and then, all of a sudden, static appears on the screen. River scans it with their eyes, and I make out what looks like an email. Who from, I don't know.

"Yes, awesome!" River cheers. "Now try something else. A website."

A devious grin appears on Eli's face, and I know why when a post from Amber's Instagram pops up on the screen.

"Stop it!" I squeak, and the image disappears as Eli bursts into a chuckle.

"Hey, wasn't that the girl who's been hanging around Amina?" River asks.

I purse my lips, waiting a minute before replying, "Yup."

River looks back and forth between Eli and I, stopping when they say, "I'm lost. What's the deal with her?"

"Nothing," I say sharply. "Eli, can you just focus on the task at hand?"

I bring my plate of food onto my lap and stab my fork into a hash brown, wishing back that pleasant moment when I wasn't thinking of Amber. Eli closes his eyes again, setting his mind on something else of his choosing. The screen flickers between a few things—a children's animated TV show, a Tik Tok live stream, an ad for face cleanser—but when the tiny speaker cracks out the word "Singh," River tells Eli to halt.

I get off my table and go over to get a closer look at the reporter on the tiny screen. I can't read the writing scrolling across, but I can hear her voice.

". . .not only parents, but many others have voiced their concerns about Singh's new school system, specifically the lack of any knowledge being shared to the parents of the children in them. Here's what politician Sawyer Tunn said at the rally outside the White House today."

The scene switches to a man standing at a podium in front of a crowd.

"It's not only wrong," the man says. "It's a violation of the rights of the parent who raised their kids and now have had them taken away from them indefinitely! Our country is founded on freedom, and to take away a family's right to make their own decisions for their child is wrong! Singh says it's for their safety, but what is the threat? There has been no harm done to these kids except by the government that chose to lock them away, and no one knows where! President Singh is unfit to lead this country! We need a president who will be open, honest, and most importantly, make morally right decisions!"

It returns back to the reporter in the office as she says, "President Singh has refused to make his own comment on the subject. He has also failed to address the increasing concerns about whether the health issues that many of the students taken into the schools had been experiencing are resolved. With public outcry this loud, it's looking like the United States might be seeing a new leader soon."

The image cuts out, and we all stand in silence until River finally speaks.

"Well, fuck."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I'm excited about this chapter. Also, next chapter's gonna be good. Hopefully. I love you all! Bye! Also, ignore any actual laws about how politics works. I'm making up alternate ones for the sake of this story.


	16. Chapter 16

"Who's that politician?" I ask.

"Don't know," River replies.

"Wait, if the public is angry about the schools, then are our missions to free the schools even necessary?" Eli questions. "There must be other groups who are pushing to stop the schools."

River shakes their head. "They don't know where the schools are. Only the kids who have been to the schools know, and considering that the group of people on the TV had no idea what's going on inside the boarding schools, I'm assuming nobody who's made it out has chosen to go back to their homes, or else they tried and were caught by trackers."

"So if Singh loses his presidency, then who takes over?" I ask.

"I never paid much attention to how politics works," River says. "But as long as Singh is out, then whoever it is will be able to release the kids, and then maybe we can get some solid answers about what happened to us, who did it, and why."

My mind falls back to Sawyer Tunn, the politician with much public support. The people are outraged, yet they have no idea how bad it truly is. I wonder if that's the only thing keeping Singh in power: if he's the only person with the information, nobody without that information can confidently say that he's doing something wrong. However, Sawyer Tunn sounded pretty confident.

_______________________________________

The basement is quiet. With everyone asleep, the water trickles lightly through the pipes, and the furnace hums softly, saving its energy for daytime. At 4:00 in the morning, there's not really much to do, but I couldn't fall back asleep after rolling over in my bed and seeing that Amber wasn't there. She probably went off somewhere with Amina again, as she's been doing every day. I'm down here, getting a head start on finishing putting the pieces together to build the last few copies of the transmitter River and Eli worked on together. The mission starts tonight, so everything has to be finished by then. 

A knock on the doorframe startles me, causing me to drop the screwdriver I'm holding, and I whip around in my seat to see Amina coming inside. 

"Uh, hi?" I say.

Her smile is like maple syrup. It's incredibly sweet, yet it feels like it could drip off at any moment to reveal nothing but a plastic spout. The smile I return is more like crackers—salty and ready to flake away at any second. 

I don't know why she's here. She should probably be with Amber right now, training or something. She's been with her the past couple days, practically attached at the hip. Remembering that only makes my jaw tenser, and I clench my teeth to keep control of my emotions.

"Hi, I thought River would be here," she says. "But they're probably still sleeping."

"Yes, most people sleep at 4:00 in the morning," I comment.

"You're not," she points out, sounding more friendly than I'm being to her.

"Couldn't sleep," I mumble. "I'll let you know if River comes by. Don't want you to keep Amber waiting."

Amina doesn't thank me. Instead, she looks concerned. 

"Are you okay?" 

"Yeah," I snap back, sounding obviously not okay. "Doing dandy."

I spin back around and pick up my screwdriver to continue putting pieces together. I expect Amina to leave, but she doesn't. She walks around to the other side of my table and leans back against the shelf behind her. Her peering eyes keep me from being able to focus, and I look up at her, annoyed.

"You're clearly not okay," she says. 

"I'm not going to confide in you," I respond. "I hardly know you."

Amina lets out a slight chuckle. "You and Amber sure are different in that way. I feel like I know everything about her by now. Sometimes she goes on these tangents where it's like she can't stop talking, and I have to to her to back on track."

Amber does that when she's nervous. It's one of the cutest things she does. She'll start by explaining something that's on her mind and then end up rambling so long that she's brought up the question of the meaning of life or something equally as intense. But I never bent her back to the initial topic. I let her wander so far that she'd find herself stepping close to the edge of the earth, and I got to be there with her. She could take me on an adventure with just her mind, leaving whimsy suspended in the air like pixie dust. 

"Yeah," I say. "She does that sometimes."

"Yeah." Amina watches me work for another moment. "Well, I won't force you to talk to me, so I'll leave you be."

She stands a little longer, as if she's waiting for a thank you or something, but I'm not going to thank her for doing what she should've done minutes ago. Eventually, she gets the point and steps around me, exiting and pulling the door shut on her way out.

______________________________________

She has her makeup done, something she hasn't done in days. Eyeliner with a gold touch on the inside, and a pale pink lip. Her blonde hair rolls over her shoulders in waves like a waterfall, reflecting light—or maybe emitting its own. Plain blue jeans and a white tank top. Somehow she's just as beautiful in that as she is when she's wearing a sequin dress. Maybe I'm biased. I wasn't expecting to be hit dumbfounded by the sight of her. All I did was I enter my room.

Amber turns to me at the sound of the door creaking. There aren't any snails climbing around sugar lace vines on her arms. They must be in someone else's care, a smart decision considering she's supposed to leave in less than an hour.

"Hey," she says shyly, expression clear, nervous, if anything. There's a pause. "I'm going soon."

She awaits my answer with eyes on me like a contestant on a talent TV show waiting to hear if they made it through. Her breathing is controlled but heavy enough for me to hear it from three metres away. 

"So I've heard," I mutter.

She looks down at her clasped hands before bringing her eyes back up and asking, "Are you mad at me?"

What does she want me to say? Does she want me to say no, to give her approval to leave and risk her life? Sadly for her, that's not at all what I want to say. 

"Yes," I say.

Just the simple acknowledgment of my feelings makes them tear through the dam I built, leaking into my face, making me have to bite my lip to keep my tears from breaking loose. I try to steady my own breaths, but the twist in my stomach yanks my lungs down with it. 

Amber switches her eyes between me and the floor, uncertain of what to say. Luckily for her, she doesn't have to say anything, because I can't hold my opinions back any longer.

"Amber, why can't you let the others go instead? They can get TJ and our friends, and then you won't have to."

"I need to do this," Amber pushes, "for myself. If anything happens to my brother, I need to know that I tried."

"So you want him to see you die? Is that it?" I respond, the anger rumbling in me beginning to boil over. "You have three days of training. Only an idiot would do what you're doing."

She's getting emotional now too. I can see her tears smudge the eyeliner in the corner of her eyes. 

"Andi, I have to do this."

"Why?" I explode. "Is it because of TJ or because Amina wants you to?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Amber shouts back. "This isn't about Amina! I'm trying to do the right thing."

"The right thing would be to stay!"

"Why are you being so controlling?" Amber complains. "It's my life! I can do what I want with it!"

"Because your life doesn't only affect you!" I snap. "What about me?"

"You?" she scoffs. "You stopped talking to me a year ago and only started being nice to me again because you had no choice! Don't pretend like you give a fuck about what happens to me, because we both know you don't!"

"Amber, I do! I'm in love with you, you idiot!" 

The room goes dead quiet instantly, save for my sobbing. Amber stares at me speechless, and I don't blame her. I shocked myself with that too. 

The longer the silence lasts, the more I regret letting my mouth get ahead of my brain, and I turn to go, wishing I'd said nothing at all, but then I feel something brush my arm, and I look down to see a white ring, detailed with what looks like tiny flower shapes among the microscopic netting, solidifying over my palm. I close my hand around it, feeling my heartbeat pick up speed like a free fall. Slowly, I drift my gaze back around to the girl behind me. As soon as our eyes meet, that slowness is broken as she yanks the sugar lace like a rope, pulling me in. The white dissolves into the air as she brings her hands to my jaw and kisses me. 

Kissing her is like talking to her in a way, but more chaotic, more desperate. Rather than walking up to the edge of the earth, we're jumping off it, diving into something we're both scared and excited to discover. I feel her body step up against mine, and adrenaline spirals through me, preparing me for the end of the fall, but I don't want to ever reach the bottom. Her thumb gracing my cheek keeps me wishing for more as I surrender over all of my control to her. 

Our lips parting is like landing. I feel the tangibility of the real world come back to me while my lungs attempt to adjust to the change in altitude. She smiles at me, and I smile back, and we both break into a fit of giggling, unsure what to make of what just happened. 

But then it hits me: this was our first kiss, and it could also be our last. Quickly, the tears return to my eyes, and I hold my gaze on her, feeling like a balloon that's been let go of to get lost in the wind. 

"Please don't go," I whimper. 

Amber touches her hand to my arm as she whispers, "I'm sorry."

I swallow hard and nod, accepting her answer. She's going, and I can't stop her. At least I won't be wondering anymore when she's gone; I know she likes me back. 

And then the ground rumbles—literally. It's an explosion, one far beyond the capabilities of any of the teenagers here. Someone's attacking the hotel. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I love this chapter. I loved writing it, and I hope you all love reading it. Yeah, anyway, um, have a good night :)


	17. Chapter 17

"What's going on?" I shout to the first person who runs by, which happens to be Alistair. 

"They found us!" he responds. 

He dashes down the hall and around the corner, following a trail of others. They're going down to defend the hotel. But when another rumble shakes the building, rupturing a crack down the centre of the floor, I realize they don't stand a chance. Amber grabs my hand and pulls me back into the room and toward the window. Right as she's about to open it, another explosion hits, and we both scream, covering our faces as glass shatters to the carpet. 

"That works," she mutters. 

She creates sugar lace stepping stones that she uses to climb through the window frame, and I follow her lead. Below us, there are around fifty black suits and ten vans. There's no dart guns anymore. These are real guns, evident by the blood spilling from the kid they just shot dead. None of the adults enter into the building, probably because they know what's about to happen next. One of them tosses one last grenade, and it blasts away a portion of the wall, causing everything on top of it to crumble. When our bedroom starts disintegrating, so does Amber's stairway, and we go plummeting toward the dirt. Our sudden fall turns a ring of guns pointed at us. I know that the one-story fall won't kill me, but they might. 

I land on my elbows and knees, impaling my leg with a piece of gravel. I let out a hiss of pain, coming to terms with the fact that I'm going to bruise later, but at least I didn't break any bones. I look up through the hair in my eyes, and see one of the black suits—trackers, probably, as Alistair and Amina would call them—about to pull the trigger. I've accepted that I can't run, not with five guns pointed at me, but then a flash of lightning zaps the person aiming the gun at me, scorching their skin black and bubbly. I look to Amber who looks like she's about to throw up at the sight of the corpse flopping to the ground. 

I start to stand up, expecting guns to rise with me, but they don't. It confuses me for a moment until I see a face step up beside me, and I realize it's Leif. He may have mastered his ability, but his inexperience with fighting real people shows in the way he's avoiding looking down at the man he killed. Amber gets up as well, and she steps closer to Leif, but she stays far enough behind him to show that she's scared of him and what he can do. 

"Try anything, and you die!" Leif shouts. 

The trackers look to each other but don't lower their guns. I think they don't know what to do. 

"Go," Leif whispers to us. "Get out of here."

I feel Amber's hand touch mine and I clasp my fingers through hers. She starts moving away, and when none of the trackers do anything, I spin and go with her. We make it around the corner of what's left of the building before we're confronted by more trackers, and immediately bullets start coming, but Amber builds a shield of white. It fractures with every ping of a shot, but she rebuilds it fast enough to keep them from reaching us. 

Then another explosion roars, but it sounds different than the ones in the building. It's brighter and sharper. It's not the building exploding; it's one of their vans. Apparently, there's a kid who can create explosions with their mind. Unfortunately, she isn't quite skilled enough yet to do it every try, because while she's in the midst of trying to work up enough energy for another blast, a shot strikes her through the head. 

While Amber is distracted, tears building behind her strong mask, her shield is getting worn down by the last tracker still focused on us. The others have run off to tame some other kids attempting to get away. One more bullet makes the sugar lace burst into sprinkles of dust. 

"Amber!" I scream.

She whips back around and realizes her mistake, but right as our enemy's about to take another shot, the gun melts down into a puddle at her feet. Confused, she turns around, revealing Amina staring at her. Alongside the girl is a smaller boy. He looks like he must be in middle school. I didn't realize there even were any middle schools affected by the not-shootings. He touches the woman, and a look of confusion flashes across her face before she goes running off down the street, aim set on something I can't see.

Amina and the boy run up to us.

"You hurt?" Amina questions.

Amber and I shake our heads. 

"Good. Let's go."

Amina starts leading us away, but I look back to search for the friend we left already. Soon, I see him come sprinting out from around the pile of fallen bricks. He sends one last bolt behind him, striking someone out of sight, before spotting me and hurrying to catch up. 

"Where's Eli?" he asks. 

Eli! I have no idea. When was the last time I even saw him?

"Guys! Where's Eli?" I shout ahead. 

"We'll have to hope he made it out," Amina answers. 

"We can't leave him!" I argue. "I'm going back."

The second I try to turn away, Amber grabs my hand to stop me. 

"Andi, you have no ability," she says. "You'll get killed."

Up until now, I haven't been bothered by my lack of any abnormal power. It's never been something I needed nor cared about, but now the truth strikes bitter on my tongue. If I could do something cool like my friends, then I could find Eli and maybe save him. 

"I'll go back," Leif volunteers. 

"There's no point," Amina counters. "If he's still there, he's dead by now. If he's alive, he's long gone."

As much as I hate it, her reasoning is valid, and although Leif obviously wants to deny that, he can't. he knows as much as the rest of us that it's the truth. Now in agreement, we follow Amina in between buildings and around corners, getting us far away from the blood bath to the point where we can't hear it anymore. However, I don't know whether that's because of our distance or because it's over. 

The sound of a vehicle engine approaches, and Amina signals for us to go through a door into what looks like an abandon dry cleaner's. We duck down below the windows until the sound has fully faded, at which point I don't stand back up right away. I let my muscles relax, and suddenly all the pain from my fall comes pulsing through my limbs. 

"We need to keep going," Amina says. 

"Okay, but where?" Leif Challenges. 

"I don't know," she says. "Somewhere."

"Can I use the toilet first?" the younger boy says. 

"Fine," Amina replies, "if you can find one."

He nods and goes toward the back of the shop. 

"Just curious. Who is he?" I ask.

"That's my brother," Amina answers. "Jake."

"Hey, guys," comes Leif's voice from across the space. "I think I found Eli."

I bolt up and run over, but Leif isn't with our friend. He's staring at a tiny television in the shape of a box sitting on the back counter. The screen flickers rapidly between channels, only letting a single word from each channel get out. What's peculiar is that Leif isn't controlling the TV. Then I put it together. Eli's controlling it. Somehow, he knows where we are, and he's sending us a message. I focus in on the words being said as the same message starts again but using different channels. _Fifth. Street. Wall. Mart._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this last night but held off on posting it, since I knew I likely wouldn't have time to write today. This was officially the hardest chapter to write, because I don't really write action-heavy scenes too often, so please don't judge to harshly. Thanks. Love you. Bye.


	18. Chapter 18

_Fifth. Street. Wall. Mart._ 5th Street Walmart. We're on fifth street right now, and I saw the Walmart a bit farther down the street. 

"He's at the Walmart," I exclaim. "Let's go find him."

I start immediately toward the door where we came into the dry-cleaner's, and Leif follows, but Amber brings up a question that makes me pause. 

"How does he know where we are?"

He only recently discovered that he can project the waves he sees and hears onto electronic screens. Certainly, that isn't the peak of his abilities. This could just be another piece of what he can do, but then again, knowing where we are seems a bit random. Maybe he could've projected the message on multiple devices around, but that would be risky. One of the trackers might've picked it up on their phone and knew exactly where to find Eli. Maybe he didn't think about that when he was doing it. 

"And if he knows where we are, then why doesn't he just come to us?" Amber adds. 

"Amber's right," Amina agrees, although I'm pretty sure nobody asked for her opinion. "It seems off." 

"Well, you're more than welcome to stay here," I tell Amina. 

Amber raises her eyebrows at my sass. It seems Amina is the one topic we have very different stances on. She thinks she's friendly, and I think she's trying to be way closer with Amber than she should be. 

Amber steps over to me, blocking my view of the girl behind her. I think that's on purpose. She knows I'll respond better if Amina's not involved. 

"All I'm saying," Amber starts, "is that if it were Eli, he would come find us. I'm scared that this could be a trap by some trackers to get us to go there."

"Okay, but there's no way for them to know what's on every TV station, let alone control it from there," I reason. "So either way, Eli must be there."

Amber holds for a moment before finally releasing a breath. "Okay, you're right."

The three of us start walking out, but Amina's sigh makes us wait. 

"Fine," she says. "Once Jake's back, we'll come with you."

The boy reenters the room at that moment, asking, "Where we going?"

"To get their friend who may or may not be captured by trackers," Amina says. "You can stay here if you want."

"No way," Jake responds. "I want to confuse some trackers."

"What exactly is your ability?" I ask. 

"He can make people hallucinate when he touches them," Amina explains. 

"I can make their nightmares a reality," the kid says with a devious grin. 

I'm a little put off by his response, but Amber doesn't even blink and just says, "Kay, cool. Let's go."

The streets are silent, but we're cautious, eyeing every crack between buildings as we pass by. If I hadn't just experienced it, I likely wouldn't have even believed it even happened. It's like the town absorbed its ambush entirely, and now even the dirty tire tracks have smeared from the road and cease to exist. 

Amina takes the lead as we approach the Walmart doors. It's not a real Walmart anymore. In order for it to be that, it'd probably need a sign instead of just bright shadows among sun-faded paint from where the letters used to be. The glass is streaked and foggy, but she can still see through it. After checking the windows, she goes toward the doors. She has to push them open, although they say they're automatic. 

As soon as we step inside, I hear a voice shout, "Over here! By the pharmacy!" It's River. I recognize it instantly. 

I dash over to the location, my friends following close behind. When I get there, the shelves shade the spot where River is kneeling down on the ground by Eli who's taking deep breaths while River has their hands pressed firmly over Eli's foot. Various bandages and cotton pads, all stained with blood, scatter the floor around them. 

"He was shot in the foot," River says. "He can't walk." 

Immediately, Amina shoves her sleeves up and gets down by the injured boy. She pushes River's hands out of the way, replacing them with her own. Eli's foot has a bandage wrapped around it, but that hardly does anything to stop the bleeding.

"Let me take it from here," she says. "Is the bullet still in his foot?"

River shakes their head frantically. "No, I got it out."

Amina spots a kitchen knife and lighter among the waste on the floor. River stares at her, holding their tense, red-coated palms upward. Amina returns her attention to Eli and begins unwrapping the wound. As soon as the gash is revealed, I have to cover my eyes. 

"Give him something to bite down on," Amina says. 

River finds a new cloth from the store racks and stuffs it in Eli's mouth. Eli, dazed and exhausted, hardly reacts. 

"This is gonna hurt like hell," Amina tells him. 

Eli, although looking like he's only half-here, his eyes fluttering between open and closed, manages to nod. 

Then Amina drags her thumb over the pit in the boy's skin, and his eyes go wide as he screams as loud as his blocked mouth will let him. Amina's melting his skin, and he's in agony, but she doesn't stop until the wound is closed, making Eli's skin look shiny like porcelain. Eli's chest expands and retracts heavily as he breathes, and Amina reaches for some wipes from the shelf to clean her hands. 

I've been so stunned by Amina's healthcare skills that I didn't even notice Amber grab onto my arm, but now I feel her clinging close to me, keeping her eyes shut. She's really not good with blood. 

I feel her grip loosen, and she lets me go, but then I realize she's falling, and I stumble to catch her. She hangs limp in my arms, eyes floating closed. She's fainted. 

"Amber," I say, hoping she hears me. 

I carefully set her down on the ground and take her hand to squeeze. Nobody else comes to my side. Do they not care? When I look behind me, I realize that's not the case. Everybody else has passed out too. I get up and buzz between bodies, shaking them to try to wake them up. I'm the only one left standing in this quiet, abandon store, and I don't know why. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so y'all are gonna learn some stuff pretty soon. I'm excited, because it's getting close. Close to what? Well, you'll see. Love you all! Bye!


	19. Chapter 19

Paranoid, I glance around, scanning my surroundings for something to explain what just happened. Someone must be here. Someone must've done something to them. 

"Hello?" I shout. "Who are you?"

My words echo back to me. Nobody's here. 

"Andi?"

I turn around to see Amber coming back to consciousness. Immediately, I fall down to my knees and take her hand. She sits up, groggy. 

"What happened?" she asks. 

"I don't know. You all just—" I look around at the people starting to stir around me "—fainted."

Amina starts to stand up, nearly tipping over on the way. 

"That was bizarre," she says. 

"Only us?" Amber asks me. "Nothing happened to you?"

"No."

When River comes to, they crawl over to check on Eli, who's still asleep. Jake sits up next, groaning like being woken by an alarm clock. Leif seems unaffected. He just stands up like it's nothing, putting his hands in his pockets and looking around. 

"What's up?" Leif asks.

"You all fainted," I say. "I didn't see anyone, but someone must've done this."

"No," River says, looking up at me. "Nobody was around."

"Well, maybe you didn't see them—"

"I didn't see them, but I know nobody was anywhere close to here."

"How to you know?" I quesiton.

"Because that's my ability. I can sense when people are around and where they are. How do you think Eli knew where to send that message?"

The pieces come together now. I've never asked River about their ability. I feel like a bit of a bad friend. That's like not knowing when it's someone's birthday. 

"There's only one common denominator that all of us share except Andi," Amina says. "This has something to do with our abilities."

"How could our abilities make us all pas out simultaneously?" River questions. 

"I don't know," Amina replies. "There's a lot none of us know about what happened to us. This could be one of those things. Let's just stay here tonight to make sure that something like that isn't going to happen again."

"What about the mission?" Amber says. 

I look at her, eyebrows furrowed. "Amber, we were attacked. The mission's off."

"But my brother—"

"We don't have the people of the resources to continue," Amina argues. "And I don't want any of us pushing ourselves after today."

Amber grabs on to the shelf behind her to pull herself up onto her feet. I stand with her, holding my arms out in case she falls again. 

"I'll go in alone," Amber says. "I go to that school, and they knew I was coming with our librarian, so I'll just say she dropped me off."

"Right," Amina says sarcastically. "Like that's gonna work. You, one person, is going to free an entire school."

"Look, I don't care about freeing everyone," Amber argues. "I just want to get my brother and my friends out."

"Amina," Jake says, speaking up for the first time. "If I were there, would you really just leave me?"

Amina stares at her brother for a minute. Then she reaches out and pulls the boy into her arms. He scrunches his nose at the act of affection, but Amina ignores it and finishes hugging her brother. When she lets him go, he fixes his shirt, and Amina looks to Amber.

"Okay," she breathes. "But I'm staying on the outside. You'll need someone who can get help in case you need it."

A smile sparks on Amber's face, and she runs up to hug Amina, and Amina takes in the embrace. I put up with it for a second before letting out a loud cough to break it up, to which River flashes a smirk. Amber comes back to me, and, noticing my annoyance, slips her fingers through mine, making me grin involuntarily. 

"I'll stay back too," River says. "I'm not exactly cut out for another horror show of a school. Plus, Eli will need someone to make sure his foot heals okay."

"I'll go with Amber," Jake volunteers, but he's quickly met with opposition.

"No, you won't," Amina says. 

I imagine Amber walking alone into the place River described. I'm sure it wouldn't take long for her to be broken down to crumbs, as strong as she is. She has a hard shell, but she's soft on the inside, and it would only take one crack for the rest to crumble. 

"I'll come with you," I say to Amber. 

She smiles and steps in, pressing a kiss to my cheek. 

"Hey, I'm down too," Leif speaks up. "Do I get a kiss?"

Amber pretends to throw something at him, to which he flinches and chuckles. 

"Amber kissed Andi?" comes the fragile voice of Eli behind me. He lets his head fall back against the shelf behind him again as he huffs, "Finally."

________________________________________

In a deserted town, there was bound to be a deserted car. Amina, who seemed to have appointed herself operation leader at some point, found a black 1988 Jaguar XJ6 which, although one of its doors was dented in so bad that it didn't lock, had all the parts needed to make it start. There was hardly any gas in it, though, and what it had was probably decades old, so we only forced it to move us to the nearest functioning gas station before filling it up with fresher fuel. Leif zapped Amina's phone with enough energy to let her use Google maps to follow the coordinates I recalled. With too many people in the car, I was squished on the floor of the back while River, Eli, and Amber got the seats. Leif had claimed shotgun before we even found the vehicle, and Amina—well, she's entitled, so she's driving. The whole way to the school, I silently regretted not treasuring that spacious black van we used to have, wishing it hadn't gotten taken when the trackers came. 

The trees around us close us in, disguising out car and separating us from the school, which lies about half a kilometre away on the other end of the forest. Amina didn't want to take any chances by parking closer. That means Amber and I have to walk there, but at least it's not a mile. During the entire journey, Leif is one step ahead of Amber and I. In this time, he tells us about the select few people he cares about saving. 

"We need to make sure we get Clarissa," he says.

"You know Clarissa? Amber responds. 

"Who's Clarissa?" I ask. 

Leif's steps turn to trudges as his demeanour droops. "She was my girlfriend."

"She's not anymore?" I say. 

He shakes his head. "I did something really stupid, and she broke up with me."

I don't even think about asking what he did. It doesn't matter. Good people deserve second chances, and he's good. It's hard to imagine that Leif would've hurt someone on purpose, but I also don't doubt that he'd accidentally go too far with a bad decision. 

"I still love her," Leif mutters. "I realized that when we almost died."

"Which time?" Amber asks with a chuckle. 

"The most recent time," Leif answers. "I should've tried harder to fix things. Even if she doesn't take me back, I want her to be safe."

Amber steps up alongside him. "We'll get her out. We'll get all our friends out."

"First we need to figure out how to get in," I remind her. "There's probably going to be security everywhere, and they probably won't hesitate to kill us."

Amber's face falls deeper into contemplation. "We should've made some kind of plan before we started walking."

For a second, I think we've reached the end when I see the wall of trees break away in front of us, but then I see the forest continue on the other side of the gap, and I realize we've come up to a body of water somewhere in between a pond and a small lake. Amber and Leif turn right to go around it, and I'm about to follow, but then I spot movement to my left, and I look over to see what appears to be two people. 

I grab Amber's hand and yank her back into the trees. Leif notices and ducks in with us. These people could work for the school. They must. They couldn't be students. No students are allowed outside, especially not at 9:00 at night. Although I don't know who they are, I'm certain that these people are not our friends. They're not going to let us pass if they see us. 

"What's going on?" Amber whispers. 

I point to the two figures sitting at the edge of the pond, and Amber squints trying to see them. 

"Who are they?" Leif asks. 

"I don't know," I reply. 

Trying to get a better view, I wind around some trees and find a spot where I'm covered enough by the branches but have a good enough line of sight. The longer I focus, the more I can distinguish. They're together, but they're not just talking. They're making out. Apparently even evil people have some kind of emotions. 

Then I realize they're not adults who'd work at the school. They're teenagers, two boys about my age, one blonde, and one brunette. I take a step forward, and suddenly it clicks in my mind who they are. 

With feet ready to run to them, I call out, "Cyrus! TJ!" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment your theories about what's going to happen next. Thank you so much for reading! Sorry this took a few extra days. I love you all. Have a good day.


	20. Chapter 20

The two boys look up at me, and excitement floods their faces. Instantly, I dash over and engulf them in a hug. I haven't even been away from them for that long, but when you think you may never see someone again, a day feels like too much. 

"Andi, where have you been?" Cyrus asks as he lets me go. 

"It's a long story," I reply. 

Suddenly, TJ's caught by Amber's embrace, and the younger, and taller, sibling lifts her up off the ground. When he sets her back down, it takes a few seconds for her to let him go. 

"Hey," comes the last person behind us. Leif steps up to our reunion, saying, "I think I know you guys. Weren't you in detention two weeks ago for skipping class to be in the janitor's closet?"

Both boys' faces turn red, and Amber snickers, saying, "That's not what you told Mom."

"Well, she went a lot easier on me thinking that I got in trouble for asking too many questions in class," TJ responds. 

"Okay, you can tell us all later," I say. "Right now, you guys need to get out of here."

"What are you talking about?" Cyrus questions. 

"We've come to rescue you guys," Amber replies for me.

Confusion flashes over Cyrus. "From what?"

"From the school," I say. "We know it's awful there, and they're exploiting your abilities for—"

"Wait, Andi," Cyrus cuts me off. "We're not in any danger. This is just a boarding school."

Amber, Leif and I all share a glance, but none of us seem to be able to wrap our heads around what Cyrus is trying to say. 

"What?" I respond. "But we've met others from other schools like yours, and they've all said how they treat you like you're not even human."

"Maybe theirs," TJ says, "but ours is just a school. It's a little strict, sure—I mean, Cyrus and I had to sneak out in order to be alone after curfew—but we just go to classes during the week, hang out in the evenings, and they have constant medical care for us. They're not quite sure why we have powers, but they're trying to figure that out, and in the meantime, they make sure we're all okay."

Amber shakes her head. "But—" 

Amber's trouble comprehending that is evident, but for me, it's starting to make sense. Miss Dancy said we'd be safe at the school. Maybe I was right, and she really was being honest. 

"I came here to save you," Amber utters. 

TJ's sight shifts from his sister to something beyond her, and I spin around to see a woman in light blue sweater, with a lanyard hanging from her neck, standing on the other side of the pond. 

"Damn science teacher," TJ mumbles. 

______________________________________

Sneaking in has officially failed. The "damn science teacher" is also known as Mrs. Eden, as she introduced herself to us. Amber's still in shock. She doesn't trust the nurses enough to even open her mouth to let them shine a light in it. The most she does for them is answer the questions about how she's feeling, although only with one word answers. Leif seems to not care at all. He listens to the nurses completely, and I think I even noticed him fist bump one at one point. 

I'm somewhere in between. I listen when they ask me to sit down on the bed, and I respond truthfully to every question except the ones about how I got here. 

"Miss Dancy was driving us here, but we got in an accident, so we made it the rest of the way on our own."

"I'm glad you made it okay," the nurse responds. 

She has a friendly face, with a wide smile and big brown eyes. Her dark brown hair is tied up in bun, but a few strands still fall out. Her name is Nurse Arietta, but she told me just to call her Ari. If I had to bet, I'd say she isn't one of the evil people River described. 

"What is your ability?" she asks me. 

"Um, I can say the alphabet backwards."

"No, silly," she says with a giggle. "I mean your abnormal ability."

I let out a breath. "I don't have one."

She furrows her brows. "You don't? But everyone has one. You said you were from Grant, right?"

"That's correct. I was hiding in the bathroom during the not-shooting."

"How peculiar," she whispers. "We'll have to do daily check-ups on you until your ability manifests. We don't want something bad happening to you if you get it unexpectedly."

I give her a nod of thanks. "Okay."

Her smile is interrupted by the entrance of a man in a white doctor's coat. Ari looks back at him as he says her name and asks her to speak with him for a moment. 

"I'll be right back," she tells me before heading out of the room. 

She seals the door, leaving me in this big, white room. There are twelve beds here in total, each with their own little table beside them. Tall windows let light stream in, illuminating the already bright space, and making Amber's hair glow even more than it already does. 

She looks at me from her bed across the room. Then she stands up and goes over to the door. Leif comes from his bed at the end of the room to do the same. 

"What are you guys doing?" I ask. 

Amber shushes me and puts her ear to the door. I walk over to them to try to hear what they're so intrigued by. Through the door, the faint sound of the voices outside floats. 

"But they were all fine yesterday when I checked them," Ari says. 

"They were," comes a deep voice, who I assume must be the other doctor, "but ever since all the kids fell unconscious this afternoon, these nineteen have been experiencing symptoms of some illness we can't explain. They're having uncontrollable limb spasms, dizziness, and their abilities seem to be acting up without their command. At points, they'll start walking, but they all claim they have no control over it. It's as if they're being controlled by someone else."

"Okay, so this is some kind of neurological disorder?" Ari guesses. "Something to do with their abilities is affecting their brains."

"That's the assumption we're operating under. Adam is the worst affected."

Adam. He's been having issues since the not-shooting. I wonder what his ability is and why it's hurting him so much more than the rest of the kids. I also wonder why I have no ability. Ari seems to think I'll get one soon, but I'm not so sure. Could it be possible that I'll get one eventually? If so, why is it so late? Will it be weaker than those of the others? Or will it be more?

"I'll make sure the other nurses know to keep a close watch on the kids to make sure they don't get worse," Ari says. 

"Good," the doctors responds. "But if you're as smart as I know you are, you'll think of a plan for when they do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took me a while, because I was watching Lost In Space while writing it. I'm excited for you all to read the rest, and I've already got the cover for the sequel. I'm gonna try to write the next chapter for Us In Red now, so have a good night!


	21. Chapter 21

Amber and I were assigned a room on the top floor of the dormitory building. My old Art teacher, Miss Lilah, is the one monitoring this floor. She told us she wanted us to get to sleep early, because we must be tired from our journey to get here. It's strange to imagine that she of all people would want to hurt me. It doesn't add up. Money can make people do things, but not if they don't want to. And if her motivation weren't money, what would it be? Death? She didn't exactly act like someone being threatened with their life would. 

Leif was put in a room with two other boys, but right now, he's sitting on the vacant bunk in my room, listening to Amber and I discuss our next move. 

"We should stick with the plan."

"Amber," I say, "the plan was made to get the others out of danger. They're not in danger."

"Not that we know of," she replies. 

"They gave us all check-ups, snacks, and rooms to sleep in. Have you noticed how nothing happened to TJ and Cyrus for sneaking out? They were just sent to bed. That's a shocking contrast to the messed-up stuff River told me about."

Amber doesn't respond. 

"Hey," Leif speaks up. "If you care at all, I'm with Andi on this one."

Amber stays quiet for a minute before sighing. "We'll have to tell River, Amina, Jake, and Eli."

"Of course," I agree, "but we can't go out now. We'll have to wait until morning."

"Can it be after we eat?" Leif asks. 

"Sure," I reply. 

"If this," Amber says, "is all just some show they're putting on, then—"

"Then they'll slip up, and we'll get us and our friends out of here," I cut in. "I'm not sure why River's school was so different. Maybe only some of the schools are bad? This one just seems normal. Well, as normal as a school full of abnormal kids can be."

Amber nods. "Okay."

"Cool," Leif says, springing up onto his feet. "I'm gonna go to bed. It'll be nice sleeping in a room without ants for a change."

After Leif returns to his room, Amber and I change into the pyjamas that Miss Mildew set out in our room for us. We didn't plan on staying this long, so we don't have anything more than one of the little communication devices River built, but even those doesn't work without Eli here, so they're basically useless. 

"Turn around," Amber says. I do as she asks, and we both slide on our pyjamas. As I'm buttoning up my shirt, she asks, "Done?"

"Yeah."

I spin back around and look at her. She starts braiding her hair to keep it from getting knotted, like she does every night. But usually she's rushed or worried or just overall on edge. I haven't seen her truly calm for a long time now, and it hits me differently. 

"You know," I say, "it feels kind of weird not having the imminent threat of death chasing us. It's like I can finally breathe."

She smiles as she steps over to where I am and laces one of her hands through mine. "And I can finally do this again."

She leans in and kisses me softly. It feels like morning dew dripping off a leaf. By that, I mean it's delicate and has been building for a while. Now the desire is fulfilled, but even after she steps away, I still haven't had enough. 

"So," Amber says, walking over to the bunk left of the window. "Do you want the top or bottom?"

"Either is fine," I respond. 

"Good, then I'll take the bottom."

She's about to go turn out the lights when I stop her with a thought that I only realized now. 

"You never told me," I suddenly say, "when I told you."

She starts drifting back in my direction, looking confused. 

"Before you kissed me," I go on, "I said I—I said I loved you. You never told me your answer."

She lets out a breath and a smile glitters on her face as she says, "Remember when I brought you to that high school party, and you got separated from me, and your dad came and took you home?"

"Yeah."

"It was after you left. My friends were having fun, and—" she keeps her mouth open while she searches for the rest of her sentence "—I just couldn't. And it was that moment that I realized it. I realized that, the girl who made me a headband for my birthday out of her dad's old tie from the nineties—I loved her."

My eyes stay on her, holding on in awe like she's the Mona Lisa. But she's better than the Mona Lisa. She approaches me and brings her face in, but instead of kissing my lips again, she kisses my cheek. 

"Time to go to sleep," she says gently. 

She shuts off the lights, and we both climb into our beds. It's dark and quiet, but even so, there's too much mental stimulation going on for me to sleep. I wonder if River, Eli, Jake, and Amina are worried. We didn't give them a time limit. Amina mentioned that they're not coming in after us if we can't get out, because she isn't going to risk her ass for ours. I don't think we planned for if we got trapped here. We assumed that if we could find a way in, we'd find a way out too. As the hour hand on the clock passes the one, I'm still awake, my mind too loud to let me sleep. 

"Amber?"

After a moment, I get a response. "Mhmm?"

"Can you sleep?"

"I'm so tired I could probably sleep through a hail storm."

"But not my voice?"

There's a second of silence before she replies, "Not you."

I let that hang in the air for another minute, staring up at the pitch blackness. 

"Any chance I could join you?" I ask. 

"Sure, Bambi."

I smile and climb down the ladder. There's just enough space next to her for me to slide in, and I already feel more at home. Her fingers find mine, intertwining in the dark, and she adjusts her position so that she can lie on her side again. Heat radiates from her body, and I can hear her breathing. It acts as a stable white noise that helps me doze off into slumber. 

____________________________________

I haven't been in a cafeteria this crowded since the day before the not-shooting. The space is huge with skylights lighting the rows of tables. Amber, Leif and I get into the lineup for food, and once we've filled our plates, we gaze out at the busy room, deciding where to go. 

It's a bit overwhelming actually, but that feeling feeling disappears when I spot Buffy's face pop up out of the crowd, and I wind through the tables to get to her. I drop my tray down on the table and swing my arms around her. She squeezes me tight to the point where it's hard to breathe, but I don't mind. A second in, I feel some others pile onto our hug: Jonah and Marty. 

"Cyrus told me you were here, but I didn't believe him," Buffy says. "What happened to you?"

The group hug dissipates, and everyone returns to their seats. Cyrus and TJ also sit at the table with the rest of them. Amber sits her tray down as well and lowers into the seat next to mine. 

"It's a long story," I reply to Buffy. 

"I bet," Jonah says. "You were probably freaked out when you got your ability. We all got ours here, and they'd told us we were going get them, so we knew what to watch out for."

I make myself laugh but finish by responding, "I don't actually have an ability."

"Really?" Jonah says. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah," I huff. "I think I would know it if I did."

Jonah glances to Buffy, who senses my annoyance. 

"Were you with Amber this whole time?" Buffy asks, changing the topic. 

"Um . . ." 

I consider mentioning everyone else, but even though she's my best friend, it might be better to keep them a secret from her, if only to keep her safe at the very least. I don't want her to be in an awkward position if she knew that there are many others trying to avoid the schools. Would she tell the teachers here? Better not to test it, at least not yet. 

"Just us and Leif." I look around for the boy, but he's off eating elsewhere. "You'll meet him at some point."

"Amber?" comes a voice I don't know.

Amber looks back to see a girl with long black hair, a septum piercing, and heavy dark makeup. At the sight of her, Amber jumps out of her chair to hug her. 

"Pepper!"

The girls let go of each other with smiles on their faces. 

"Where the fuck have you been?" Pepper asks with a laugh. 

"God, where do I start?" Amber replies. 

"Well, come join me at my table, and you can tell me about it."

Amber nods and spins around to pick up her tray. I expect her to just leave, but before she does, she reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze. She lets go, but my eyes follow hers as she backs up, our connection cutting away only when she turns around. 

When I look back to my friends, they're all staring at me with wide-eyed confusion.

"Did something happen between you two while you were getting here?" TJ asks me. 

"Uh, maybe," I mutter, "if kissing her counts as something."

That earns a few gasps. 

"I thought you hated her?" Jonah responds. 

"Wasn't she the chick you ghosted?" Marty joins in. 

"Well, that's another long story," I reply.

All of a sudden, a blur of colour flickers behind Cyrus, and my eyes immediately turn to it. It's fuzzy, but I think I can make out the image of a girl. 

Marty glances over to what I'm seeing, and says, "Hey, Buffy."

The image disappears, and I snap my head to Buffy. 

"What was that?" I ask. 

"Sorry about that," Buffy replies. "I'm not good at controlling it."

"And _it_ is . . .?"

"I can project versions of myself in different places at once," she explains. 

"Oh," I say, trying to process what that would look like. "Fun. What about the rest of you? I guess I should've asked earlier."

"Well," Jonah answers, "Marty manipulates light. TJ makes forcefields—sort of, basically. Cyrus sees shit when he touches things—"

"I see memories," he clarifies. "I see the past as objects saw it."

"That's so cool," I say. "Can you pick out certain moments, or . . ."

"No," he replies. "I just see whatever they want me to see when they want me to see it. I never know when it'll happen."

"And I just see infrared light," Jonah finishes. "Nothing near as cool."

"Well, you see heat, so that's definitely not cool," I joke.

Jonah rolls his eyes at the pun and picks up his glass of juice. Right as it touches his lips, his hand jerks to the right with such a force that it sends the cup flying. The shatter is loud as it hits the floor. 

"Shit," he mumbles. 

"Are you okay?" I question, take aback by the incident. 

"Yeah," he responds, standing up from his chair. "I just gotta clean it up now."

Marty and TJ go with him to clean up the mess, and I look to my three remaining friends with worry. 

"Was that normal?" 

"It didn't used to be," Buffy answers, "but lately stuff like that has been happening more and more."

"The doctors are looking into it," Cyrus says. "They're gonna find a way to help stop the spasms. We hope," he adds.

________________________________________

Getting out wasn't hard. The kids are allowed out as long as they stay within a certain radius of the school. With the distraction of another kid losing control of his leg and kicking a rock so hard that everyone heard the snap, we found a moment when the teacher supervisors weren't watching us for us to dip away into the trees. 

"That's not possible," River states. 

They all slept in the car. Amina said she was worried about what might've happened to us, but they decided to follow a 48-hour rule before giving up. I'm not sure if she really would've just left us here or if she would've gone to get help; when she's scared, she hones in on the logical facts, and I don't know if she would've allowed herself to feel any sympathy, although she does seem to have a soft spot for Amber, so maybe she would've wanted to help us. 

Eli's doing better. He's fully awake, and if it weren't for the brown-stained bandage on his foot, you wouldn't be able to tell that he endured any injury at all. He sits in the open doorway of the car, with Jake on the chair behind him, the two boys taking part in the conversation while the rest of us stand. 

"But it's the truth," Amber insists. "There's nothing bad going on there. It's literally just a boarding school."

"There must be more to it," Amina says. "Maybe it's all an act."

"Then they should win an oscar, 'cause that's one hell of an act," Leif responds. 

"Okay, so this school isn't corrupt," Eli concludes, "but there are others that are. We need to find out why, and if this school is even connected to those."

"By 'we' you mean us, right?" Amber says. 

Eli nods. 

"Do some searching," Amina says. "See what you can find to do with the other schools."

"I'd suggest starting with the principal's office," River offers. "If he knows anything about what's happening at the other schools, I guarantee you'll find something in there: emails, files, something."

"There's one more thing," I say. "Some weird things are happening to the kids. We overheard a doctor saying how it's like the kids are losing control of their actions sometimes."

"Something similar has been happening to me," Jake says. 

The rest of us turn our attention to him. He rarely has much to say, so I'm curious to hear his connection to this. 

"At first, it was just sleepwalking," he explains. "At the hotel, it happened a lot. My friend had to barricade the door to keep me from leaving the room in the middle of the night. Then I started grabbing things without trying, like my arms were possessed."

Amina looks both angry and terrified. "You never mentioned this to me."

"I didn't want you to worry," Jake replies. "But now I know there might be a reason for it."

"We'll do some digging," Amber assures the boy, "and we'll try to find out whatever we can that can to help you, and to figure out what the deal is with these schools."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is a long chapter. That's why it took so long. Um, I'm really excited. We're nearing the end soon. Anyway, I love you all. Have a good night!


	22. Chapter 22

"I'm out!" TJ cheers as he slaps down his last card.

Leif and Amber both said they needed more time before we could continue with our plan, so I'm here playing crazy eights with my friends at a coffee table in the first-floor lounge of the East dormitory building, the building where TJ, Cyrus, Jonah, and Marty's room is. It's been a while since I've been able to sit down and play a game with friends. Even though I've been gone, my friends have welcomed me back into the group like I've been here the whole time. I guess a few years of friendship overpowers the almost one week I've been away. 

Currently, Leif is with some of his old friends, and Amber ran off with Pepper somewhere. I know I shouldn't feel jealous, but it's hard not to when I've never actually formally met this friend of hers. But Amber loves me, and I trust her. It's the other girls I don't trust. 

"How about we watch a move or something later?" I ask.

"There are only a few good movies here," Buffy answers, "and we've seen those already."

"Don't you have Disney+?" I respond. 

"Andi, there isn't internet or service here," Cyrus tells me. 

"No internet? Why?"

"It's to keep information about this place from getting out," Buffy explains. "If the public finds out where we are, then the people the school is supposed to protect us from, the ones behind the not-shooting, will know how to find us."

"It's for our safety," TJ says. 

"Like everything here," Marty mutters. "Same reason I can't go out running unless I stay within the field."

"But it makes sense," TJ says. 

"Are we still going to play?" Cyrus asks. "'Cause if not, I'll pack up the cards." 

When nobody responds, he reaches to pick up the box. Right when his hand closes around it, he freezes, and his eyes go blank, fixated on nothing specific. Nobody else seems disturbed by this, so I wait patiently for him to return to us before asking questions. 

"You okay?" 

"Yeah," he responds, carrying on with packing the cards away as if nothing happened. "Whoever owned these cards before was at a hospital at one point, I think."

"What'd you see?" I ask.

"Two girls playing cards in what looked like a hospital room," Cyrus answers. 

"Interesting," I say for lack of a better response.

"Let's play Slapjack," Jonah suggests. 

"Cool," Buffy says. "Get a hand ready for me. I'm gonna use the washroom first." She looks at me. "Come?"

"Yeah, sure."

We stand up from our seats, and I walk with her across the room and down a hallway, letting her lead, because I don't know where I'm going. It's at the end of the hall where I wait while she enters the restroom. 

As I look around, I notice a friendly face nearby. It's Leif. He's talking with a girl. I don't know her, but she's beautiful. Her hair falls down to her waist in spirals, and her teeth are white as pearls. Her nose is the most striking part of her appearance. It's thin and structured, a perfectly straight slope without curving at all. 

Before I can even think of the possibility that they'd rather talk alone, I go over to say hi. 

"Hi, Andi," Leif responds. "Have you met Clarissa?"

Of course. This is the girl he was so desperate to see. Now I feel kind of bad for interrupting their conversation. 

"Hi," I say, sticking my hand out. Rather than shake it, she just kinda looks at it then disregards it. I lower my hand down, huffing, "Okay then."

Clarissa returns her eyes to Leif and says, "I have some trig homework to do."

Leif nods. "Oh—" before he can even finish, Clarissa's already walking away "—kay."

He turns back to me, and I can't possibly hide the judgement from my face. 

"She seems . . . interesting."

"She's not that bad all the time," Leif insists. "She's just comes off that way to new people."

"Right, okay," I respond dryly. "She's your ex?"

He nods. 

"Have you thought that maybe you're better without her?"

"Don't be so quick to judge her," Leif says. "When I first met you, I thought you were a goody-two-shoes who probably stays at home on Fridays to do homework."

"And now?"

"Well, now I know you're a goody-two-shoes, but you stay at home to craft earrings out of buttons, not study."

I don't know whether to be insulted or not, so I just laugh it off awkwardly. 

"And it doesn't even matter than you don't like Clarissa," Leif sighs. "I'm gonna getting her back. She has a new boyfriend now. His name is Chad," he complains. "She's dating a fucking Chad."

I can't find it in me to be very empathetic. My best attempt is an obviously ingenuine, "Bummer."

Without warning, a loud thunk from the bathroom grabs my attention. It could've been something dropping, but it sounded a lot like someone pounding the wall. Buffy's in there, and I haven't noticed anyone else go in. She could've fallen. 

"Sorry," I say to Leif. "I'm just gonna check on my friend."

I step away from him, toward the washroom. Right when I open the door, fear floods through me as I see Buffy and four other flickering copies of her all jolting in different directions as though being controlled by a voodoo doll.

I didn't get to see her ability clearly before, but now I do. The Buffy duplicates move around in their own ways, free from the confines of the real Buffy's actions. They're 3D but not solid, for they pass through whatever they kick or swing their arms into. 

The real Buffy isn't so lucky. She stumbles back and forth, trying to keep balance while her legs step in random directions, and her hands fly out, smacking the walls, the stalls doors, and anything else in the way. She's bound to be bruised later. On her face, I can see tears streaming down, but she doesn't say a word. She looks like she wants to, but she can't. 

"Buffy!" I scream. 

I run up to her and try to grab her shoulders to steady her, but she spins around, knocking me away with her knee. She can't stand straight. She flops around, following the momentum of every movement, looking like one of those inflatable dancing guys with the long arms that you see at car dealerships. 

Through a crackly voice, she manages to weep, "Help."

In an abrupt instant, she crumbles to the ground, and the Buffy duplicates disappear. The girl is bent over on her hands and knees, gasping for air. She's regained control of herself, but now she's drained. 

I fall onto my knees in front of her, reaching for her arms. 

"Are you okay?"

In between panting, she responds with a raspy voice, "Yeah."

"You need to get to a nurse. Can you walk?"

She nods and reaches for the sink counter to help her pull herself onto her feet, but as soon as she's upright, she shakes her head. 

"Nope," she croaks and whips around, stumbling into the nearest stall.

A second later, she starts to vomit. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. I hope all of you are getting real confused and spooked and excited for the rest. I'm so pumped. I changed the cover of the story, and I have a cover ready for the sequel. I'm so excited to write the rest. We're finally getting close to the end. Only a few more chapters left. Thank you all for reading! Love you! Bye!


	23. Chapter 23

The hallway is packed with Cyrus, Marty, Jonah, and I all standing anxiously outside the nurses office, waiting to hear any information about Buffy's state. There aren't any chairs, so we sit in a circle on the floor for a bit over an hour before a nurse I recognize steps out through the door, shutting it carefully behind her as though something inside might be disturbed by the noise. 

Marty instantly leaps to his feet, still pale in fear. "Is she gonna be okay?"

Ari gives him a light pat on the shoulder and responds quietly, "Yes. She'll be fine."

"Was it food poisoning?" Jonah asks. 

"Jonah," Cyrus says, "food poisoning doesn't make you lose control of your body."

"Hey everybody's different," he tells Cyrus, at which Cyrus shakes his head. 

"That is true," Ari says kindly. "However, in a medical context, not to that extent."

"How long until she's allowed out?" Marty asks. 

"If she's allowed out," I add. 

Ari looks to me, saying, "She is. She should be ready to go back to her normal routine by dinner tonight. She hasn't had any other symptoms, so we're just keeping an eye on her to make sure."

"Symptoms of what specifically?" I ask. 

Ari freezes at that, taking a second to figure out her next words. My friends stare at her, awaiting her response. 

"Illness," Ari answers. "Anything to say she's unwell. But there's no worry. She seems fine. Looks like it was a one-time thing."

A one-time thing. Like the fainting. Everything begins as a one-time thing before it happens again, and soon you're like Jake, sleepwalking so often that you would walk off a cliff if no one were watching you. Maybe that's what this is. Maybe these powers and the symptoms—maybe our own bodies are somehow programmed to cause our own demise. By 'our,' I mean everyone except me of course. I still don't understand why I'm the only one not tangled in this malfunction that has everyone else tied around its finger. 

Marty, still curious about his girlfriend's health, asks, "Do you have any idea what caused it?" 

"Unfortunately, I've told you everything I can," Ari replies. "Now you kids should go get your homework done."

She rushes away, pulling the door to a different hallway shut behind her, this time not bothering to muffle the sound. 

________________________________________

"This would be a lot easier if we let that Marty kid help us," Leif says. "He could bend the light and make us invisible, and then we could just walk right in."

We stand outside of administration. In there, the school's secretary clacks away on her keyboard. The other offices are shut, so she's our only obstacle keeping us from getting to Principal Benton's office. 

"No," Amber says. "We're not risking him telling someone. Just stick to the plan."

Leif sighs. "Alright."

"How do we even know the principal won't be in his office?" I ask. 

"I just saw him leave. Iris says he always gets coffee around this time, and he usually takes around ten-ish minutes, so we have to be in and out in under that. So hurry up," she orders Leif. 

The boy nods and steps through the doorway into the administration room. Amber and I wait outside but peak in to watch what he does. 

"Excuse me," he says as he steps up to the secretary's desk. 

The woman looks up to him with tired eyes. Then Leif bends over the stout counter in front of the desk, yanks the keyboard unplugged from the computer, picks it up, and runs. He bolts out of the room, being chased by the shouting secretary. Amber and I duck out of the doorway as the woman passes through, turning the corner in the hall, trying to catch Leif. I didn't know he was such a fast runner. 

"Well, that wasn't the plan," Amber says with a chuckle. 

"It's Leif," I respond. "He probably forgot the plan and just improvised."

She steps into the admin room, and I follow her. We sneak down the hall, being quiet so that we don't alarm anyone inside the other offices. The principal's door is closed. I try the doorknob.

"It's locked," I whisper. 

Amber reaches for the handle, but rather than jiggle it like I did, she creates a sugar lace structure inside the keyhole. After a few seconds, she manages to create the right shape and turns the knob, pushing the door open. 

Inside, she immediately goes for the computer, sitting down in the luxury office chair.

"Do you know the password to log in?" I ask her. 

She wiggles the mouse and a smile spread on her face. "We don't need to know it. It was just asleep."

While she searches the computer, I scour the rest of the room, finding binders of school policy, a filing cabinet of student files, and a half-eaten muffin—nothing of use to me. 

"I found something," Amber says.

I wind around the desk to look at the computer screen with her. It's an email, an email from President Singh. 

_Hello, _

_I hope the school is sufficient enough for its purpose. There was a limited amount of time to build and furnish the building, so if there are any issues, please let me know. I've also attached a schedule of security for the school. This must be followed to a tee, for the students' safety is at stake. _

_– President Jagmeet Singh_

Amber clicks through a few others, and I read them curiously. 

_Hello, Singh,_

_I know you said you'd tell me when you have more information, but I fear you may have forgotten, so I'll ask again. Have you found out any information on what's caused the children's abnormalities? Right now, they aren't in any immediate danger, but some are beginning to experience strange symptoms of a disease our own doctors have been unable to identify. Please get back to me as soon as you can._

_– Dr. Ronald Metcalf_

_I hate to bother you again, but I haven't heard back from you yet, and I'm afraid whatever illness had been affecting some of the kids is spreading and becoming more severe. I'm sure you've heard about it from multiple other schools, so I won't go into the details. What I do want to emphasize, however, is that we need information on how to stop this from getting worse. Whatever the intruders did to these children is becoming less fantastical for them and more horrific. Their initial excitement of getting these abnormal abilities has worn off. Many are scared for themselves and their friends. How much longer must I wait for your reply? _

_– Dr. Ronald Metcalf_

_Singh, I know that the parents are getting upset with the lack of information they're receiving regarding their kids. I'm assuming that's why you're not responding to my emails or calls. You certainly have your hands full, but I must stress the urgency of the situation at Grant Academy. The children all fainted simultaneously today. Whatever illness they have is somehow connected, as though by some singular control source, for many of the symptoms of one are coinciding with those of another. The doctors here don't know what to do, and we don't have enough beds to care for all the children at this rate. I urge you to respond. _

_– Dr. Ronald Metcalf_

_Dear Dr. Metcalf,_

_I'm very unpopular with the public at the moment, and I fear I may not be in my position for much longer. Please continue with operation the way you're currently doing so. The threat is still out there, and it's getting stronger. I've lost contact with other schools and have been struggling to understand why, for every time I send an someone to look into it, they don't return. Unfortunately, it seems that soon I may not be able to help you any longer. My final command to you is to keep your school's location secret and continue with business as usual, no matter what contrary instructions you receive. _

_– Jagmeet Singh_

Having reached the end of the emails from that sender, Amber clicks the 'X' and closes the browser. 

"Why does it sound like they're just as clueless about everything going on as we are?" I mutter.

Amber doesn't have time to answer, for we hear footsteps outside the room, and we hurry to disappear from the office. Amber freezes as she reaches the beginning of the hallway where the secretary has her keyboard back and is plugging it back in, grumpy. 

When she sees us, she's not happy. "What are you girls doing?"

"We're really sorry," Amber responds. "We were just looking for someone to help us, since you weren't here."

The secretary lets out a huff. "What do you need?"

"Um, I lost an orange hair scrunchie, and I wanted to know if it was returned to the lost and found?"

The lady groans and swivels around in her chair, scooting over to pull out a white cardboard box from the shelves. She rummages around through it for a second. 

"It's not here," she says, turning back around to us. "Try again tomorrow."

"Thank you," Amber says with a nod.

She grabs my hand and pulls me out of the admin room. In the hall, Leif holds a yellow piece of paper. 

"You better've found something important," he says. "I got 3 days of detention for that."

"Yeah, we found something," I reply. 

Something, but not what we had expected. Actually, I think I may have more questions now than before. The puzzle pieces I already had are beginning fit together, but now I've been giving a whole other pile of pieces that I have no idea what to do with.

_______________________________________

"Do you believe them, then?" I ask.

Amber looks up from the notepad. It's dark out, now, almost curfew. She's sitting on her bunk, drawing random doodles in a pink pen she found during the day. I'm standing by the window, gazing out at the dark. The trees are steady, for there must be no wind at all. Blue moonlight tints the grass. Aside from the faint hoot of an owl somewhere in the distance, it's quiet. 

"Believe who?" 

"Our friends, your brother, the teachers," I respond. "Do you think they're the good guys?"

Amber sets her notebook and pen down on the quilt and shifts over to the edge of her bed, hanging her legs off the end. 

"You do," she says. 

It's not a question. She says it like a fact. She knows me. 

"I think I do too," she adds.

As I turn to fully look at her, I catch sight of something red sticking out from under the pillow on my bunk. I walk over, and Amber's eyes follow me. Quickly, I realize it's a rose and carefully pull the flower out, bringing it down to examine. Tied around its stem with white string is a folded piece of paper. I open it up and read the message written in pink ink.

_Dear Bambi, I know this is probably a dumb question, but I've been wanting to ask you it for a year, so I'm gonna do it anyway. Will you be my girlfriend?_

I turn my eyes toward Amber, a smile taking me over, and then I sit down next to her, setting the rose aside by her notebook. 

"You have no idea how hard it was to get a rose," Amber says with a chuckle. "After finding seeds, Pepper managed to use her ability to grow it, but then it was a white rose, but luckily Iris can change the colour of things—"

"You're right," I say, cutting her off. "It is a very dumb question."

I bring my lips to hers, and she immediately invites me in. I haven't kissed her in a day, but it feels like a year, and I can tell by the way she pulls me in closer to her that she feels the same. I get tingles down my spine as her hand presses on the small of my back, and I have my own hands up at her jaw.

We continue to kiss, sinking more and more into each other, and one of my hands goes around to the base of her head. That's when I feel something odd, a bump, but not of skin. It's cold and hard, and it doesn't brush away at my touch. I back out of the kiss, still feeling the unknown speck. Amber looks at me confused as I move around her to get a better view, but she's even more confused when I pluck out a tiny piece of metal from her head. She feels the back of her head, and when she brings her hand back down, blood drips from her fingers. 

"What is that?" Amber asks. 

I look at the tiny object. It's not just a chunk of metal. It has many tiny parts that make up some kind of computer chip, and Amber didn't end up with it in her head by accident. Someone put it there. 

I reach up and feel my own head. I don't have one. Suddenly, it makes sense.

"Amber, this is it," I say. "I think this is why everyone's losing control of their bodies. Someone else is controlling them, whoever made this."

Nervous, Amber tests her ability quickly. A white spiral still appears where she touches the bed. Her power must not be connected to the chip. That's something else, something I've yet to figure out. 

"That's why you didn't pass out," Amber says, piecing it together with me. "You don't have one."

I look down again at the chip. I think this is the answer to what's happening to all the kids. It's not a sickness at all. It's someone's way to try to take control of us. If that really is the case, then I need to get to my friends and tell them to remove their chips before anything really bad happens. 

Then a tiny blue light on the chip starts blinking. It's activated. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry i'm not updating often rn. I have midterms on wednesday and i've gotta study, because i have no idea what's going on with accounting. Wish me luck!


	24. Chapter 24

The blue isn't light like the sky. It's deep and vibrant, as though trapped at the bottom of an ocean. The blinking is like the ripples refracting the light in and out of sight. It's such a small thing, but I know it must have a big meaning. Has it ever blinked before? Would I have seen it if it did? Likely not. But one thing's for sure: I have to warn my friends and get them to take out their chips ASAP. 

I toss the piece of technology to the side and stand up. Amber's right along with me, knowing my plan without me having to say it. 

"We need to get to TJ," she says. 

"Yes, but he's in a whole other building," I remind her. "Buffy's just down the hall, so let's start with her. Then she can help us spread the word."

Amber nods and follows my lead and I march toward the door. As soon, and I step out into the hallway, I notice a glow of red coming from the small, caged emergency lights on the ceiling. They're only supposed to go off if there's a threat to the school, but that should be paired with an announcement or and alarm of some kind. This is unusual. 

"What does that mean?" I ask. 

"It means we have to hurry," Amber replies. 

We race down the hall toward Buffy's room. Suddenly, we hear rumbling from the ground, and Amber goes over to peer out the window at the end of the hall. Her eyes go wide at the sight. 

"What is it?" I ask. 

She turns her head back to me, saying, "We have to hurry. Something's happening. There are people here."

"What people?"

"They have the same vans as trackers, so my best guess is they're not on our side."

I grab the doorknob and attempt to turn it, but it's locked. Feeling stress flood through me, I start banging on the door, shouting for someone to open up. I'm relieved when I finally see Buffy's face, but the feeling disappears when I see six other Buffy's behind her. 

"Buffy!" I shout, but she continues to stare right past me.

Not sure what else to do, I try reaching around her neck to take her chip out myself, but she snatches my hand in the air and starts to squeeze. I knew she was stronger than me, but she's never wanted to hurt me before. This time is different. 

"Buffy, Buffy, stop," I plead. "You're hurting me."

Amber teams up with me, grabbing Buffy's arm, but Buffy reacts by letting go of me and clutching Amber's wrists, twisting her arm behind her back. Amber clenches her teeth in pain, but I take the opportunity while Buffy's distracted to spot the chip behind her hair and pry it out with my fingernails. A drop of red splashes onto my forehead as the chip loosens, and Buffy instantly drops to her knees. Amber falls backward before pushing herself back up onto her feet. 

"I—" Buffy looks up at me, dazed. "I don't know what happened."

An orange glow in my peripheral vision catches my attention, and that's when I notice Buffy's three roommates all staring at me, one of them holding a blazing flame in her hand. 

"Amber!" I squeak. 

Right as the fire girl launches forward, a white shield forms, snuffing out the fire in the girl's palm. While Amber blocks the doorway, Buffy's brain starts functioning again, and she stands up. 

"Andi," she says, "what's going on?"

"Okay, so what I'd concluded is that everyone here has a little chip in the back of their heads, and that's why you've all been acting weird and sometimes losing control, and from what I can tell now, I think they're activated."

"Oh, and there are also trackers outside," Amber adds, "but by now they're probably inside."

"What are trackers?"

"The bad guys," I reply, not having enough time to give her the full explanation. "We just need to avoid them and get the chips out of everyone else."

"Right, and in a school of about a thousand kids, that should be easy." I can hear Buffy's sarcasm. 

Suddenly a door slams down the hall, and my eyes immediately go toward the girl tall man in a black suit and a gun in hand stepping out from around the corner. 

"Shit," Amber mutters. "Okay, we need to fix your roommates, Buffy, and then get to everyone else on the floor. Andi, if anyone's abilities are too much for you to handle, let me or Buffy deal with them."

"Got it."

"Amber, drop your shield, and then we can help my roommates," Buffy instructs. 

"You have a plan?" Amber checks.

"There's no time for a plan."

Amber does as requested anyway, and the white dissolves to the ground. The fire girl springs into action, toppling over my girlfriend. She screams as the girl's flaming hand closes in on her, but Buffy finds her chip fast enough to save Amber. Then she moves on to the others in her room, whose powers aren't aggressive, so I can't identify them. Buffy and I run in together. She restrains each girl, and I pluck their chips out, one at a time. 

Once we're finished explaining the situation to them, we rush back out to the hall and see some doors open with kids streaming out in single file. The tracker is gone now, so I figure he must be the one leading the pack. 

"We'll take care of them," the fire girl says. "You guy go check the other buildings before they're invaded."

Amber, Buffy and I race down the hall. None of the kids filing out acknowledge us at all, like we're nothing more than wind. The tracker, however, is a different story. He whips around to us and raises his gun. Amber and I duck around a corner just in time to dodge the shot that sets off, but as I turn around, I see Buffy lying on the floor. It takes me a moment of trying to figure out why I don't see blood before I see the another Buffy running down the corridor opposite from me and Amber's. She gives me a wink, and feel my breath release. 

Amber takes my hand and pulls me along. As we pass by dozens of rooms, we select a few to save the occupants of before continuing on. Eventually, we make it to one of the sky tunnels. The sky tunnels are passages above ground that link the separate buildings together so that it's easier to get between them in the case that we can't go outside. This is the perfect use for them. 

The East dorm building is a battle zone from the second we step into it. Shots fling from the guns of trackers, children are fighting each other and the trackers, and the bodies of a few teachers who tried to intervene litter the floor. Before anyone can bring us into the combat, Amber pulls me into the first room to the left, Leif's room. 

He stands alone, facing the back wall. His roommates are gone, but he didn't go with them, leading me to believe that he must be back to normal. 

"Leif!" I call out.

He doesn't respond, but he does turn around. My smile drops the minute I see blinding bright sparks begin to swarm his hands and arms. Amber steps in front of me, but it's useless. We both saw what he did to the trackers back at the hotel. He steps forward, and we step back. The electricity builds, and he raises his arms, preparing to unleash it all on us. 

All of a sudden, a rupture sounds as the glass window breaks, and the branches of a tree come pouring in. Leif spins around, taken aback by the event. That's when I feel a tap on my shoulder, and I look to see Buffy sneaking past me. A copy of her flickers and appears on the tree branch, capturing Leif's focus. Right as he's about to strike, the tangible Buffy pulls the chip from his head, and he falls backward. Thankfully, Buffy has enough sense to step out of the way, avoiding the ripple of electricity that shoots from the boy. It's faint, but it would certainly be enough to stun someone he touched. 

"How did you do that?" I question Buffy. "The trees?"

"I didn't," she answers. 

"Wait, then who—?"

"Pepper," Amber answers for me. "Or someone like her."

"We don't have time to waste," Buffy says, cutting off our thoughts. "Go help the others."

"Wait, what's going on?" Leif questions. 

Buffy holds up the chip, and he understands it immediately. He, of course, knows more than everyone else here other than me and Amber, so it's not too complicated for his cloudy brain to take in. 

"Someone needs to get to Amina, Eli, Jake, and River," Leif says, reminding me of what I'd forgotten. "I'll go do that."

"Good," Amber responds. "I'll go get TJ."

"Already taken care of," Buffy tells her. "Same with Cyrus, Marty, and Jonah."

"Okay," I breathe. "That just leaves everyone else. Let's go."

Amber and I run out, ducking between dorm rooms, doing our best to avoid all unnecessary conflict. At some points, however, I wish I had done the training back at the hotel like Amber had, because she ends up fighting off several trackers and students for me, leaving those who can't do anything too dangerous for me. The kids we help all proceed to go help other kids, and some use their abilities to take down the trackers that are invading the school. Pretty soon, jumping over bodies of either dead trackers or students that have been shot by them becomes part of the routine. I keep my eyes away from the lifeless ones of the teenagers bleeding out on the floor. There's no time to mourn. 

While Amber handles one room, I run across to the next, but a crackle of a firearm alerts me that I need to move, so I zip over to the nearest door that's the least likely to contain people trying to kill me. 

My footsteps echo in the stairwell as I hurry downward. The sound of the door swinging open above me causes my heart to cut out for a moment in fear, and I instinctively reach for the door to the next floor below, but I have to retreat when I see fire on the other side. I back up to the wall and hold my breath, hoping the person above doesn't hear me, but it's too late. I see her, the tracker, descend the stairs before me. 

The memory hits me like a tornado. Those were the green eyes I saw peering at me from the bathroom floor moments before I fell unconscious. I match them in my head to the green eyes I saw staring at me in the road-side diner only minutes before I found Miss Dancy dying in her car. She's not just any tracker. She's my tracker. 

By the time I think to run down even lower, it's already too late, she has her gun up and pointed at me. If I move, I'm dead. As she approaches, she starts to look more and more puzzled. 

"You're not even going to try to fight?" she sneers. 

I don't respond. I couldn't if I tried. The barrel of her gun seems to suck the air from my lungs, making my chest shrivel up and my muscles tense. 

"Don't you have some ability?"

She takes another step toward me, and I nearly choke on my own breath. All of a sudden, I see her finger over the trigger relax, and her eyes lose their icy glare, but the gun stays up. 

"Oh my God," she utters. "You were the girl in the washroom. Weren't you?"

I don't answer, too afraid of what would happen if I do. 

"I think I might have forgotten about you," she whispers. 

The gun floats closer to my face, and I close my eyes, not wanting to see the bullet hit my nose. But nothing happens. Instead, a door creaks open, and I open my eyes again to see the woman gone and Amber coming down the stairs from above. 

"There you are!" she says. "I thought something happened to you."

Her eyes are puffy and red. Somewhere during the mess she was dealing with, she found the time to cry. I was to give her a hug to comfort her, but I know there isn't time for that right now. 

She goes ahead of me, leading the way down another flight, and we step out into the hall. There's not as much chaos going on here anymore, but the remnants of blood, scraped walls, and bizarre marks from various powers are scattered everywhere. We make our way down, passing by many rooms that have already been cleared. 

We reach another sky tunnel, nearly colliding with a boy as we enter in. It's Marty. I smile at the sight of him. He's visual proof that Buffy did in fact manage to save our friends. 

Then more stomping sounds, and I step to run, but Marty puts his hand out to stop me. At first, I think he must still be under the control of the bad guys, because he's trying to let whoever is coming get me. But then I look down and realize I can't see myself. I look over to where I feel him hand holding me back by the shoulder, and he's not visible either, nor is Amber. Once the tracker passes through the tunnel without noticing us, the invisibility drops, and I look down to see my hands there again. 

"Do you know where Buffy is?" Marty asks.

"Last time I saw her, she was back there," I reply, pointing in the direction from which we came.

He nods and takes off. Amber and I continue moving ahead. After winding through the floor and deeming it empty, we make our way down to the bottom floor. There, we step out and instantly become sandwiched by two trackers. Both guns go up in a heartbeat, and Amber swings her arms out in both directions, creating two walls of sugar lace. 

"Go!" she shouts to me.

I hesitate for a moment, but when the bullets begin pelting her shields, I take her advice and duck into the nearest room, a large maintenance storage room full of shelves and equipment. I press my hands to my forehead, trying to think of what to do now, what I can do to help Amber. She's always the one protecting me, and I hate thinking that I'm completely useless when it comes to protecting her. 

My thinking is cut off by a scream, and I run back out to the hall only to see Amber with two guns inches away on either side of her head. I can't think clearly anymore. Fear blocks my rational side, and emotions take the wheel. 

"Don't hurt her!" I cry. "Please!"

I didn't know a person could go from dry-eyed to bawling as fast as I have. I feel the warm tears like a waterfall down my cheeks. She can't die. Not her. Of all people, not her. But what can I do?

Then one of the guns pivots to me, and I stumble backward. 

Terror shocks Amber's eyes, and she begs, "No!"

Suddenly, my panic becomes amazement as a blonde boy rushes out of the stairwell and throws his arms out, simultaneously sending both trackers flying without even touching them. TJ walks over to Amber, and the two go back-to-back, positioning themselves in a stance that tells me they're ready to fight. 

"How did you know I was in trouble?" Amber questions. 

"I just kind of felt it," TJ replies.

A second later, Cyrus comes out through the same door as TJ. He glances around at the scene before running over to join me in the maintenance room. 

"TJ's ability is incredible," I say to Cyrus. 

The boy grins, letting his obvious affection for the boy shine bright. "I know. It makes him even hotter."

When the trackers manage to get back to their feet, both siblings throw up their shields, Amber's in sugar lace, and TJ's in some invisible yet impenetrable force. The bullets reflect directly off TJ's force field, but he cripples over a little more at every shot, as though he can feel the pain of each collision. 

"Close the door!" TJ shouts to Cyrus and I, and we do as told. 

The sound of the fight outside the room becomes muffled by the walls, but it's still there, ringing in the air. Cyrus and I step farther into the space and start searching around for things we can use as weapons, but we both stop when we hear a voice. 

"We . . ." the voice croaks.

We both spin around to see our principal lying on the floor, blood slowly spilling from a shot in his hip. I hurry over and try to remember what Amina did to help Eli when he was shot, but right away, I feel defeated, for I don't think there are any bandages in this room. 

"It's okay," I say. "We're going to help you."

Dr. Metcalf either can't hear me of is ignoring me, for he starts whispering something else. "We tried to keep you safe, but we failed. They found you."

Cyrus and I watch as our principal's eyes dull, and his body goes still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you see any typos, please comment and point them out to me, because proofreading this took a while since it's the longest chapter of anything I've ever written. Also, this was a hard chapter to write, because action is hard to write. Sorry if it's bad. I tried my best. But anyway, so there's only one more part left. How y'all feelin'? Excited? Anxious? Scared? Eager? Sad? Glad? All of the above? I love you all! Have a good night!


	25. Chapter 25

Metcalf was telling the truth. The schools were never the enemy. That was an especially difficult pill for River and Amina to swallow. Amina sits atop one of the cafeteria tables with Eli beside her. He has his arm around her to comfort her. Amina's hand is linked with her little brother's. I think they're all just happy to be alive. 

River has met Marty, and I heard them quickly start bonding over the issues of gender conformity when they first spoke. Just by overhearing, I learned that Marty was trans, an interesting tidbit of information I didn't know before. The two friends had been so fired up in their conversation that they had all but forgotten about the current situation. Now River sits on the table above where Marty and Buffy are on the bench. Buffy's face is especially coloured with worry. 

Cyrus and TJ are, of course, holding each other like the other might vanish if they let go, and Jonah stands by the doorway next to Walker. 

The rest of the school kids—or what's left of them—are sprinkled around the room, gloom painting all of their faces. In each person's eyes is either sorrow, anger, or fear, but they all have one thing in common; they're all on the flickering television screen that Amber and I found in the admin room. On it, Eli is connecting us to a news station. 

Lahara Lakis is in her black blazer, sitting at a table in the studio. She says the story with such poise and professionalism that it almost makes her seem heartless. 

"We received confirmation this afternoon that President Jagmeet Singh has been found dead after what appears to be an assassination. The police have yet to identify the shooter, but they are looking hard for clues that could lead to suspects." She readjusts her hands on the table as if she can feel the unsteadiness of the world right now. "By overwhelming public pressure, Sawyer Tunn has stepped up in his place, and he will be taking over as president until a new election is held."

Eli lets the screen go black, and all the eyes turn to me and Amber who stand behind the tiny television. I don't know what to say, so I'm thankful when Amber takes a step forward instead. 

"Look," she says to the crowd, "as you all know, we're in danger. I'm sure you've been hearing that since you got here, but it's worse now. Before, you had the school and the teachers to keep you safe. Now, we only have ourselves."

Ourselves is only about 600 kids. The rest were either taken by the trackers or had their lives cut short today. Most of the teachers' and staffs' bodies are still littering the halls, but some were kidnapped along with the children. I guess they must be of some use to the trackers. The only living adults left here is a group of three nurses sitting at the back of the cafeteria, all of them too in shock to focus on anything right now. Among them is Ari. I don't know how she survived, but I'm really glad she did. I wonder if this—the possibility of facing a violent invasion that ends up looking like a massacre—was in her job contract when she signed it.

"We can't stop here," Amber goes on. "There are others like us, other schools, and they need help."

I look over to her. We didn't talk about this, but the look of determination in her eyes tells me enough: she wouldn't have let me change her mind anyway. 

"We need to be warriors for the other kids with abnormal abilities," she states. "We'll help save the others from the control of whatever demon is behind this all. We'll be the strength that the others don't have." She pauses for a second before adding, "Kids with abnormal abilities fighting for freedom."

"KAAFF," Buffy utters. 

"KAAFF," Amber agrees, giving Buffy a nod of gratitude. 

Amber steps up onto the table behind us, becoming the highest face in the room. All the people look up to her, their eyes radiating something they've been missing for a while: faith. 

She gazes around at her listeners, letting this image soak into the air, before declaring with a tone so certain that I would believe anything she says without question, "We are KAAFF."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it! Thank you all so much for reading! As you can probably tell, this story is nowhere near over yet. It will continue in a sequel, which I will be posting the first chapter of as soon as I'm finished with Us In Red! So please look forward to that. In the meantime, I'd love if you'd support me by telling your friends about this story or something like that. I want to make sure my audience is still liking what I'm doing, and I want to make sure the sequel turns out amazing, so I'd love support for that. Also, feel free to make suggestions if there's something you really want to see in either the next story or another story. I can't guarantee that I'll follow them, but if you tell me your ideas, then there's a better chance that they'll come to my head when I'm writing. Thank you all so much again! I love every single one of you, and I appreciate you all so much! I'll see you soon in the next book!


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